I suggest the stake based upvote & downvote system on Steem should be as impersonal as possible.
One-way Steem can shift the mindset from personal to impersonal stake voting is with a name-change of the current staked based voting system we know as "upvote" & "downvote."
We can change the current system names from:
Upvote to "Reward" (with quick grandparent proof description in a popup when hovered over)
Downvote to "Redistribute" (with a recycle icon that you click)
Putting a positive spin on something that can easily be perceived as bad can help the sentiment on Steem. Some Steemians do not understand that downvotes cause rewards to go back into the reward pool, make it unmistakable that they get redistributed back to the reward pool to be recycled for future reward distribution.
The term downvotes, when combined with reward disagreement, can create a powerful misconception that brings the maximum pain to the end-user. Most people take staked weighted downvotes as the downvoters think "I do not like you, and I am taking your money!".
With icons labeled, Reward & Redistribute, with adequate grandparent level explanation, it is possible to separate the stigma of emotional downvoting and make it less personal and more business.
Culturally, we equate the term downvote to mean "personally not to like something"; I do not downvote on Steem because I dislike people's work, I downvote because of reward pool abuse. When you think about it, the downvote feature is something we use to police the platform, not express distaste.
Downvotes = Investment Protection
The second part of this post is something I think Steem can benefit from to further remove emotion when distributing inflation to authors by giving users a clear separate emotional outlet. - The separate emotional outlet for users could be non-stake based upvotes and downvotes (IE. likes/dislikes on YouTube.) - We can rename upvote & downvote to "Like & Dislike."
I know people will say, "bots can just manipulate the like/dislike system." And sure, they can, and they can and do all the time on every social network there is. When bots manipulate likes upwards, people can still dislike and vice-versa. Vote manipulation in this day and age is easy to spot and backfires if the goal was to bring credibility to the post.
On Steem some actions cost resource credits. New stake-less accounts get treated like second-hand citizens without even the basic rights granted to them by all other sites. Give resourceless accounts (thinking light wallets in the future) as many features as possible by giving them access to all the free actions available on the Steem blockchain. Give people the legacy experience as a base entry.
As an example, in the future someone with a light wallet strongly disagrees with a post, well they can at least give a dislike, and that gives them some feeling of vindication. It is all anyone gets on any other site. I look at it as a funnel; if a user is mad and they go to retaliate, they see a dislike button, that would be their first course of action.
Have any suggestions other than Reward & Redistribute? Leave a comment with your opinion below.
Most social media sites don't even allow a 'dislike' button because it's 'too negative' - I think redistribution next to 'rewarding' is actually a great idea, not only because it sounds less negative (and yes negativity/punishment will always trigger people), but I like it even more for the education that it will bring to the community.
As I would love to see STEEM as THE blockchain that onboards crypto-noobs I believe we could really distinguish our chain if we found a way to put tiny bits of education throughout our UI/UX.
Downvoting is already better than flagging in terms of neutralising the term (down is just the opposite of up), so after that was implemented I stopped thinking about it. But this brings a new perspective and there must be many other minor tweaks we can make that will help people understand the idea behind Steem and it's functionalities better.
Why should a thing which is (sometimes) negative not sound negative? :)
I like honesty.
Actually, I am not against renaming a flag a downvote or a downvote a redistribute, but I think in the end that's cosmetics only, and we are not discussing about the main problem here, which is that quite a percentage of flags is not given to prevent spam or plagiarism or also to redistribute rewards but just because of different opinions, personal animosities or just for fun.
For example for quite a while every single comment of @valued-customer got flagged automatically by a whale. That had nothing to do with discovering value or preventing spam (actually the whale added a spam comment under every flagged comment). And that's just one example among many.
Too many people left or even didn't/don't/won't join STEEM because of omnipresent flag abuse (just recently a potential investor from Switzerland told me he saw all these flaggs, even under official Steemitblog posts, and thus won't buy STEEM for sure).
We Steemians are so accustomed to this that sometimes we aren't aware anymore how devastating the impression for people outside of our microcosm is ...
Therefore I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.
nailed it! and with each behaviour change tweak hardfork you dent that image even more, you'll never get top flight bloggers here while they have the fear of god about the flagging wars.
I very honestly think that if we explained downvoting/redistributing better we wouldn't see so much retribution :-) Now people take it way too personal, believing 'their (!) money' has been 'taken away' and they start doing crazy stuff because they're so angry.
I'd like to think that the Tribes are solving this in part :-) Better trending pages and overall better categorized content. Not perfect yet, but getting there.
I'm not against some sort of committee where one can apply for 'rage flags' or 'revenge flags' or overall undeserved flags. Heck, @theycallmedan has offered to do this before with @curatorhulk, but I'm sort of assuming it wasn't used that much.
Interesting :-) And thanks for discussing!
I think there are different kinds of flags.
Actually they can make sense, and I guess you are adressing these kinds of flags which you think shouldn't be taken personal. Right, I agree that there need not always be a personal aspect when flagging someone.
Then there is no reasonable reaction than taking these flags the way they are intended: personal.
It is really difficult to convince investors of investing in STEEM. And I doubt that enough people will invest in all these hundreds of different tokens (without noteworthy value) as long as STEEM(it) doesen't work. I think people from outside the cryptoverse just have not enough time and interest to check all the different tribes. They want to see STEEM work - but just lets wait and see ...
The stake should come from Steemit, Inc.. One cannot expect from a single individual to sacrifice his time and money for doing that alone (and also deciding alone which flags to counter or not).
I think it should be an elected committee ot trustworthy Steemians, like you for example. :)
You are very welcome, thank you too! :)
While this is true, flags do counter the influence and outlays of the upvoters who sought to allocate rewards. I am actually far more irritated when I see my upvotes countered by flags than when I see flags on my posts and comments. I spend my actual VP on my upvotes, and I do not on my posts, so flags actually cost me my stake when countering my upvotes.
Not my theoretical rewards. My actual stake.
Thanks!
I strongly disagree with this. Bernie was involved in a flagwar (surprise!) with @fulltimegeek, and now Steemit is censoring all FTG's accounts. This indicates to me that ninjaminer Bernie has some sway with Stinc, and such an elected body being dependent on Stinc stake would not be likely to counter Bernie.
Nothing is stopping users from electing and delegating to such a flag review board right now, although such a board would have insufficient SP to counter whale flags nominally. I have also been flagged by Stinc devs in the past, so have more evidence to align Bernie's interests with theirs.
tl;dr evidence aligns Bernie's interests with Stinc's, and expecting Stinc SP to counter Bernie's seems naive.
Thanks!
Steemit, Inc. should only delegate the SP, but of course not influence the decisions of the elected committee (elected by the community, not by Steemit, Inc.).
Of course that should be made clear before, otherwise it wouldn't make sense.
Also the criteria of how to elect the committee needed much fine tuning. One could for example think about conditions like that every voter should be on STEEM for at least some weeks and had published some posts to prevent multi account voting. All that wouldn't be easy at all but worth a try ...
I just don't think that's possible. I am unable to recall an example of folks providing funding without having influence on how it's spent, other than taxpayers, and that's because we're just extorted.
Nevertheless, that would be my suggestion (Steemit, Inc. contributes only the SP, and the community elects an independant committee).
If Steemit, Inc. would agree to doing that, is another question of course ... :)
I agree with you.
No matter how you call it, it is the same and negative.
I don't like the flagging and I also do not like cheetah's comment 'this person... if this is a mistake contact via discord'. Cheetah does not check out each content just an account. If you flag/downvote give a reason and make it possible to undo it if you are mistaken.
Steemit already has a bad name and it is not really getting better.
It will never be the site @soyrosa is hoping for. Too much happened and the scammers and 'bad boys' will stay.
Most people do not read here, comment, I wonder if they invest time to find out if a post is plagiarism. That really takes time. Many people have more as 5 accounts on different sites and are not using the same username everywhere.
Good discussion, good points to think over brought up.
💕
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Actually, I am still here, because I see much potential in STEEM. The idea of a censorship free, blockchain based social media site, where, in addition, people have the chance to earn some money, is just great.
But you are right, there are also many unsolved problems for now (and I admit not being really 'happy' about the fact of having lost quite some money by my 'STEEM adventure' during the last one and a half year!).
I hope that in the end optimists like @soyrosa and @theycallmedan will be right and STEEM becomes a huge success.
Concerning @cheetah, this bot plays an important role in detecting plagiarism. However, I also would prefer if its owner replied directly under the comments in case someone complains about (possibly) wrong accusations.
Ya, good idea with the sprinkles of education on Steem UIs. It is easy to take for granted how what is seemingly easy to most Steemians, is alien to most non-Steemians.
R&R sounds very diplomatic and takes the edge off the term "downvote" I could get behind that. Redistribute would need to have a hover explainer telling grandma
By pressing this button you will influence X rewards to be removed from this content and sent back to the pool for redistribution.Using the word
contentbecause it is agnostic to comment or post type.An emoji layer as well would be good as mentioned already in this thread. I could put the crying with laughter face but not necessarily choose to remove rewards.
I think people would still consider a 'redistribution' a slight regardless of what you call it. It's still 'taking money' from them.
Good point. If people understand better how the system works, and know it is being redistributed, I think they will feel less slight. I've asked about ten random Steemians who post from time to time about how upvotes and downvotes work, and half of them thought it was like a tipping system and had no idea how the reward pool worked. So to those people, when you downvote and take the money, they don't understand why, if they knew more about how the reward pool worked, it would make more sense. I think it is a case of not understanding and feeling attacked personally.
The problem is that too often people are attacked personally here. As described above I think that's actually the main problem.
Apart from that, yes, why not call a flag (a downvote) "redistribute" to make clear what technically happens? I am not against your suggestion.
One matter that is not much considered in these perambulations is that flags return stake to the pool. Whales extract the vast majority of the rewards from the pool due to stake weighting. Returning rewards via flags to the pool that whales have missed out on extracting allows them another run at extracting those rewards.
This creates an economic incentive for flags. EIP will make this much stronger, as 25% of VP will be allocated for free flags. This eliminates the expense of flagging, and the vast majority of SP, and thus VP, inures to whales.
EIP is a terrible exacerbation of the worst problems Steem is facing, and the downvote pool is probably the most powerful economic negative impact that will be effected. Not one aspect of HF21 will encourage capital gains, and every part of it will encourage extraction of value before Steem price can reflect it.
The market is pricing in HF21 now, and that is why Steem price is falling, market cap is declining, and user retention is getting worse. Nonetheless, implementation of HF21 will make this much worse, very quickly IMHO. If it does not, I will have been proved wrong. I will be happy to eat my words, because I want very much for Steem to succeed.
If those three metrics decline precipitously upon implementation of HF21, I will be proved right. Then we will have a choice: either keep killing Steem by encouraging profiteering, or reverse course, and begin encouraging capital gains, ,and thereby investors.
I have posted on ways to do that. It's not rocket science, and I'll be glad to reiterate mechanisms that discourage profiteering and encourage investing for capital gains as needed.
I also doubt that HF 21 will be the big success everybody hopes (and most believe). However, now as it is decided, I want it to come as fast as possible to see what its real consequences are.
I hope it will be a positive surprise, even if in many earlier discussions I expressed my concerns.
That's actually a brilliant way to frame it. Taking a 'negative' emotion and showing how it benefits everyone when it's redistributed.
Great 'rebranding' of the button for sure.
This is a UI/UX feature to be implemented by companies leveraging STEEM as they please. I'd say worth a try.
Good idea, R&R, Reward & Redistribute :)
I like it. Make me think more about where rewards will get redistributed to.
Brilliant. Love it. Sign me up.
We could also do emotion-based voting as facebook uses. Then have users list there percents for emotions that are predetermined in setting and something along those lines. That way users determine what their votes mean to them and what emotions they want.
Someone could put a happy face and still give a negative vote value.
How about downvoting bernie or haejin?
I target trending page abuse. The curve in the EIP helps target abusive self voters, my hope is that will take care of that type of abuse.
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You talked about the reward pool, not trending page.
Like noone uses steemit anymore.. trending page is unimportant
Thanks Dan for this review and suggestion!
Really, I didn’t know about this until now!
I wish Steemit inc. will implement this beautiful and positive retouching in this coming Hard-fork
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Makes sense what you say but there are plenty of people who downvote because they don't like you in exactly the same way they upvote because they like you (because you are a big fish).
The fact hardly anyone invests time in reading, voting manual and commenting says enough. There is way less engagement as we hope/think there is.
If I downvote you, you loose all your upvotes? I still do not know how it works and I doubt I will use it.
If most people not even read a post, use a bot to vote (like) how will they downvote/dislike something?
If you start using the Facebook dislike this means it is personal. If I dislike all posts I see/read here it's never ending.
If you dislike you should give a reason why.
You don't like the theme, it is written for insiders only, not catching, ugly drawing, bad grammar, just a link, bad taste of humour...?
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This is a direct consequence of allowing bots to vote. Doing so completely obviates the social aspect of Steem, and contradicts the most profitable business model in the world today: social media. The FAANGs have proved social media to be that most profitable model, and but a cursory glance at stock markets reveals this.
Steem can be world changing, but to do that it needs to be different from legacy social media. Enabling social media to be a vector for financial transfer allows government to be effected via Steem, and it is impossible to overestimate how liquid democracy can change governance mechanisms.
Stake weighting is a legacy mechanism that allows financial interests to control society IRL, and it does the same thing on Steem. It is necessary that stake be only voluntarily utilized for actual freedom to be potential, but financial stake is not the only stake. Allowing it to be the only metric for VP thus reduces society to mere economy, and while most of us don't give this much thought, the economy is not the most important aspect of society.
The influence of financial stake needs to be realistically weighted for Steem to succeed to effect it's full potential, and the judgment of actual people on the value of content needs to be the ONLY mechanism enabling voting to effect an actual social media. Allowing bots to vote devalues humanity to be equivalent to mere inanimate devices. Financial stake being the only metric that determines VP completely obviates actual human values and degrades society into nothing more than it's economy.
Mike Tyson once said that Don King would sell his momma for a dollar. That is the fruit of negating all human social value and only counting financial stake. Almost none of us would do that, because other aspects of human society are far more valuable than money.
Either we eliminate non-human devices from posting and voting, or we reduce the value of humanity to parity with our tools. Social media infested with bots is being valued appropriately in the market today, and Steem price, market cap, and user retention is the pudding that proves it.
If you put it this way I agree, but the biggest part of Steemians is not using a bot at all or delegating SP to a bot to vote for them.
That biggest part is that part who runs out of SP fast and has no way to engage to others.
Since I can only speak for myself. Without help you cannot make it here (and help means growing a bit more/enough SP to post and comment) and if people help you, you help them back.
I better not say how many comments I give a day and what the percentage of comments is. I have big doubts the bots are the reason. The real reason is it takes time. Time people don't have or like to invest in answering, perhaps in commenting if there is some left but only 5 -8 words.
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Either people are having conversations with one another, or it's not social media. When bots interact with people it's not social media, but gaming. If I wanted to play a game I would. I come here to talk to foks, and the possibilities Steem creates to do more than that has the potential to change the world.
Giving up that potential for any amount of money is not attractive to me. For the few pennies I earn here, it's a repulsive idea.
RC (resource credits) are a possible problem for accounts that haven't created a network, and back in 2017 when I started Steemit was delegating a nominal amount of Steem to enable new users to interact with abandon. By the time the policy of Steemit changed, I was supplied with enough SP to do without the delegation, but my experience today would be vastly different than it was then. I can sympathize with frustration over rc issues.
Delegation is a better cure for those issues than buying votes IMHO.
I agree it is not social media if people, no matter what the reason is, are not able/willing to communicate.
So the first question is: Why is the biggest part here? It cannot be because of the huge income they make, also not about the gaming effect which growing can be.
It might explain all these unused accounts too. It is also not about good content since shitty posts earn as good or even better.
I am surprised if I hear how many different sites people visit a day, all sites that "pay".
STEEM is already a fulltime job for me. 🤔
It does cost more as I earn but there are people who seem to live from it. If you are that far or high on the ladder being social is not needed anylonger?
It would be nice if delegation is an option again and if those who need it also find out how. Since that is a big issue too. No tips, advice to do what, use other tags, be be noticed, etc.
I think so many changes in a short tine are not positive plus those who make a new account should see a list of what is needed to post, comment, how to buy steem, most used tags, if you need a delegation where to be, etc.
Like everywhere there will be a group die hards who will survive this and the rest will leave.
BTW not all bots are bad dustsweeper is a good one that night help those who just started to grow.
What you see now is that upvoting a comment or someone if you have less voting power is a waste of your vote/steem plus the receiver has nothing from it.
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There are very few challenges that can only be solved one way. Dustsweeper is not the only way to meet the challenge of low VP voters. Since I am not here to collect tokens, it's not an issue for me personally, but since it affects the community it's an issue I consider relevant.
Voting bots are anathema to social media, and are compromising Steem's ability to capitalize on the immensely powerful business model social media. I am convinced presently that Steem has gone the wrong way in building it's business model by implementing extractive mechanisms and automated voting rather than decisively encouraging creators and curators to interact personally, and some market metrics strongly support my assessment.
User retention is terrible, and getting worse. Steem price is continually falling, worse than other alts, and since I've been here Steem has fallen ~50 places on Coinmarketcap, indicating that despite being one of few tokens in the social media sphere, it's business operations are so poor as to perform worse than tokens that have no such use case. Again, social media has proved the most profitable of business models in fiat markets, and Steem is really screwing the pooch to do social media so poorly as to underperform tokens that don't even have a business model, like Dogecoin.
Upvotes have other value besides financial, and this is why they are featured on many social media sites that have no financial aspect attached to voting. Steem is encouraging only looking at votes financially, and this is demonstrative of the general bad business model it's undertaking.
Society is far more valuable than it's economy, or we'd all be pimping out our mothers. I'm not going to pimp anything, particularly my integrity, for economic reasons. Steem should be able to grasp these facts by now, and I expect it has. HF21 indicates that they are making these problems worse, and that indicates to me Steem may have a short future ahead.
You may not think it's reasonable to seek to kill a business in order to profit, but it happens all the time in fiat markets. KK&R, Bain Capital, and others disassemble companies as a business model, and make money doing so. None of the Steem in existence today came about through investment. All of it was mined, and most of it remains in the possession of those that mined it. If the ninjaminers wanted to create capital gains they would distribute Steem far more broadly, rather than effect code that increasingly concentrates it back into their wallets by exploiting stake weighting to extract rewards, but they don't. Basically, they sell it to new users, and then get it back as rewards through stake weighting.
It's possible to interpret that failure in more than one way, but I've had a lot of conversations with those folks, and presently I have no confidence that any of them actually desire to produce capital gains, which could be immensely profitable. More than that I cannot say with confidence.
Social media is being crushed with censorship everywhere we look today, and that includes Steem. A fortnite ago 8chan was shut down. Endchan nearly so today, and also today 4chan suffered a temporary outage. Free speech is a warzone, and big money is determined to destroy it. I do not have enough digits to count the number of accounts that are presently being completely censored on Steem, so there is reason to suspect that censorship is an impetus to the harm being done Steem, as it is difficult to censor by design.
Folks are moving to Weku, Somee, and others. I don't want to migrate, but I am not in charge of where the community goes. When platforms die, their communities are scattered, and there is a good community here that I very much want to remain in contact with. Where they go, so will I.
Hope to see you there.
I would rather just see steemit remove the box that discourages downvotes.
They can just have a reward FAQ.
Most of the other UIs don't have a box that discourages downvotes. Getting downvoted sucks especially when it is just someone trying to annoy you, but it is much better than just seeing people do whatever they want consequence free.
Not a Bad idea bruv
@theycallmedan -
@simplymike, @abitcoinskeptic and @guiltyparties said much what I would have said, so shan't repeat it. I did note, though, that @guiltyparties' comment had been flagged which bears out all the comments about downvotes and flagging. Having been caught in a downvoting "war", I am painfully aware of how the practise is misused. I have said elsewhere that had this happened to me in my early days on Steemit, it would have been a death knell. Now, having seen it happen to others - for inexplicable reasons - I just sigh and carry on.
The practise is a means of bullying which, IMHO does absolutely no good at all.
Fiona
This is a great idea. People underestimate the power of words and I think this would be a great way to put a positive spin on something that really does hold a very negative stigma.In addition, like you said - it creates more of an understanding and awareness of what is going where.
I like the idea of renaming to 'reward' and 'redistribution', even though I think it won't solve the core problem. I rarely see downvotes that are given out because of reward pool abuse. They are either random, because someone has commented on a post or received a vote from someone who's involved in a flag war, and - the worst kind, imo - because someone disagrees with what the author states in his post.
Redistributing wealth can get the fur flying in some corners in which Steem is used ... but, be that as it may, I do agree with using terms that give the best possible understanding of what is actually being done. I have been the subject of a few "redistributions," and because I knew that, I could handle the emotional aspect of watching big, well-earned rewards being whittled away without taking it as personally as I might have. But I can't imagine going through that without knowing!
@theycallmedan This is a great Idea. This change will make the content creators reminds every time what it really means getting upvote, that getting share from reward pool . It always reminds that downvote is not a negative thing but simply reverting reward back to the same pool where we all depend for rewarding.
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That's actually an interesting idea. It's a simple change but it would change a persons mindset towards their "voting" behavior, especially for new users who are unaware of the old system (I.e. this current one).
Cool idea
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I totally agree with @theycallmedan the word upvote is sometimes confusing but if it can be changed to reward I think that would be much better.
The problems with downvotes is the flagrant abuse some powerful users make when whales just pick up a smaller and start downvoting him/her.
Downvotes are s needed thing when dealing with a staked based platform run on inflation. Without the ability to disagree on rewards, there would be no way to fight abuse, and the whole idea of Proof of Brain goes down the tube.
With staked based reward disagreement is going to come displeasure on whoever gets "downvoted" - there isn't a way around that. The only thing we can do is soften the blow as much as possible.
@theycallmedan, You've catched absolutely true point and definitely it's all about the name, if we change the name then definitely we can change the Perspective.
We all are Emotional Beings and to tackle with emotions in right way then we have to fill clarity in our Foundations and Base. My vote is for your thoughts and definitely change of names should be implemented.
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this is an fantastic idea
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I think this is a great idea!
And furthermore... I wonder if there's something to the idea of a bit of anonymity to rewarding... If a problem is bots, well, would people use bots if they couldn't be sure if the bot was actually voting for them? I dunno, it needs some workshopping, but to some extent, should we perhaps not be able to tell where a post got its rewards from? We either think "yes, good post, I will also reward it" or "no! this post is getting more than it deserves, I'll redistribute some of those rewards."
Hmmmmm. What are the negatives? That abusers can hide behind anonymity? In what way does that benefit them? As it is, they are known and it doesn't seem to help. Hmmmmmmmm....
Now that's a really good idea to counter the misuse and misrepresentation of both upvotes and downvotes. Right now, primarily due to all the malicious downvoting that's only intended to harass good users to leave the platform, not many users are using them to return to the reward pool.
upvoting is an action in a free market.
down voting doesn't exist in a free market.
Reward pool distribution belongs to no one until the 7 days is up. It is no ones property. Free markets do not allow purchase without property.
...it is not a cultural problem, it is a fundamental flaw in steem that will never be addressed (until inflation has stopped).
It is why steem will never suceed.
You can fight/try to engineer human behavior, as much as you like, it won't change it.
Steem is trying to do just this.
It will fail.
The market knows this also. (22 cents!!!)