RE: A Case of Retaliation when Flagging // @steemflagrewards.
Dear Slobberchops, I respectfully disagree. This is not supposed to be a battlefield, but it is. What was supposed to be a valid curation tool is being used by some to destroy accounts regardless of whether they abused the system or not.
One of the flaws of SFR is that you have to comment with a flag, exposing yourself to multiple counter flags should you target the wrong account. This fact alone will keep SFR membership low and abusive whales unconcerned.
To really be effective you have to stop posting and you can flag anything you want. Ahh, but you can't get rewarded for that now can you?
This is exactly what I may do at some point in the future; nothing but up votes for the ones I follow and flags for those that have irritated me up until now. No posts, no comments, no curation rewards, no quarter given and none begged.
Unfair if you can't flag back some will say. Maybe, but not less so than someone flagging with $300,000 worth of SP spread over several alt accounts which you already pointed out. This "unfairness" was deliberately built into the system so some could control their stake. To undo this, all flags should have the same weight and all this nonsense will stop when abusers have the dog shit flagged out of them as a true community effort. A curation tool is useless when 950,000+ users are afraid to use it and go inactive.
Enjoy the holidays and wishing you a happy new year!
Same weight as what? $0.01? $0.001? In that scenario, account networks such as the dart/tard group would have already won since they have 20K+ accounts. The Byteball farmers will be especially potent since they all have several hundred, if not thousands, accounts.
Even the nuisance of Steemit Defence League terrorized the crap out of people with their annoying 180+ accounts of dust votes.
On a closing note, the community flagged the crap out of Mr. Rep 83, but doing so required a consistent 2M SP on his tail. That was not going to happen. None of the whales were interested in a prolonged flagging session. There were also not enough active smaller accounts that wanted to be in the crossfire.
I get where you are coming from but I wouldn't necessarily call it a flaw as one of the functions of the comments is to provide the flagged some feedback as to why they are flagged and provide an opportunity for constructive criticism.
Of course, many abusers know exactly what they are doing and our words would essentially fall on deaf ears or worse they would flag back which does happen from time to time.
We do make it abundantly clear that we all must be wise and not target whale abusers prone to retaliate. I do think the community does need a way to collectively express their disagreement in the form of flags while minimizing the possibility of reprisal.
This could be achieved potentially by off-chain delegation mixing and a web site whereby the flags are sent with some degree of anonymity. It would be tricky to pull off but I think it could be worth it.
The alternative is to allow the often tyrannical and abusive stakeholders to continue to do what they are doing with no resistance whatsoever.
That option isn't very attractive for me.
Empowering the community with a means to assemble their disjointed stakes in solidarity against collusive voting and other activities that erode the confidence in our chain is better one for me.
It just would take a hell of a lot of work and not sure if it would be worth it. Obviously, we'll get a shit load of push back so gotta count the costs.
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"The alternative is to allow the often tyrannical and abusive stakeholders to continue to do what they are doing with no resistance whatsoever."
They are doing exactly that, ..with impunity. When discovered, they just start a new account so chances are you flagged the same individual or group repeatedly. We simply don't know who they are.
"This could be achieved potentially by off-chain delegation mixing and a web site whereby the flags are sent with some degree of anonymity. It would be tricky to pull off but I think it could be worth it."
The delegation and/or flagging could be done through sock puppet accounts if people are willing to dedicate the SP for the cause.
If the abusers use automated systems to up vote their own accounts, why doesn't SFR use the same methods to flag them? Or isn't that possible?
Thank you for your time and effort. Merry Xmas!
It's a work in progress. It is also limited by the SP available.
You see, @sadkitten used to approach it with that mindset. Unfortunately, it wasn't fruitful. Not enough people willing to let go a portion of their SP to be dedicated for flagging.
There are members of SFR that use said method to flag.
Let's bring it back to larger stakeholders. Take Mr. 83, again, in order to effectively "counter" him, the community would have to pool at least 2M SP indefinitely...and that's just to counter one individual and his 3-4 alts.
Tell you what, the last time this was attempted, it lasted about a week.
It is also important to remember that those "bad actors" you talk about tend to have many supporters. So, even in the example I provided, it's not as simple as 2M SP. It's, in fact, much greater.
Thank you for that bit of history, I wasn't aware of earlier attempts to curb the abuse this way.
Got some reading to do :)
If we could all live happily ever after wouldn't it be great? It's not going to happen though.
It was never intended to target big accounts, more educate the small and new ones. We have done this with several people now. They create an account, see trending and follow the lead, with the crap content and bid-bots. Its wrong, and we are trying to change things in our own little way.
Happy Holidays to you too!