The morgenseiten of Katharsisdrill 6 - Flagwars & selfvoting
I haven't had much time for the social part of Steemit lately. A bit worn out, I have concentrated on drawing, making my daily bicycle or strolling trips, eating porridge, helping my girls with their homework or music lessons. Sometimes when looking at Steemit I see a post by one of you that I really wanted to support, but simply forgot about. Sorry about that. I haven't forgotten you... or I have, but I regret it.
Then today I went to vote for @steevc who I just remembered that I had forgotten. He was one of the first steemians I followed, a fine man that I have got to know through his personal blogging, and a person that is really concerned and interested in this platform. I read his last post and there was a strange line:
I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who supported me yesterday. That really meant a lot to me. You rest my faith on this platform and community. It's not just about greed. It's also about friendship and altruism.
Puzzling, right? So I found this post: Haejin is a bully
Flagwars has been part of Steemit since the beginning. Reputations have plummeted, profiles has been put into the grave and drama has prevailed! @steevc is the exact opposite of a drama queen, but when you care for something it is impossible to keep out of politics and that means drama! I only followed this with half an eye, but I have seen that many posts have surfaced lately about the profile called @haejin - a person who is using a large investment and multiple profiles to earn a lot of Steem, not breaking any rules, but extremely antisocial and abusive.
The only solution to such things are changing the rules, and I hope the witnesses will come up with something. Self voting has shown itself to be a problem, I think, and even though I have reinvested most of my earnings to be able to guarantee myself some income (which is mainly why I am here), I would be willing to give it up for the best of the platform. Maybe it would add up in the end anyway as everybody had to use their votes on others posts too. @vcelier proposed that you should only be allowed two self-upvotes every 24 hours, which might also be an idea.
EDIT: I got it wrong. Here is what @vcelier actually proposed: " ... my proposal would be that you cannot upvote the same account, including yourself, more than 2 times in a period of 24 hours."*
I know that you can just make an extra profile, that people can make agreements etc. but a step in the right direction is always better than no step.
My friend @shortcut has started to write some posts every morning - #morgenseiten he calls it - morning-pages. Here is his explanation of the project:
It goes like this: you shall each morning write from the soul, anything going through your head.
He writes a lot more, but this is the essence :) (Read his first morgenseiten post here)
I have decided to try the same. I write from the top of my head every morning or late morning if I have been sleeping late. I only correct typos and make a headline afterwards. Else everything is left as written. Expect some of it to sound like stage directions.
Actually, my proposal would be that you cannot upvote the same account, including yourself, more than 2 times in a period of 24 hours.
So, it would not only restrict self-upvotes, but also multiple upvotes by friendly whales that only upvote your account.
It's hard to find the right balance. Just about any restrictions can be worked around.
Sure, but the idea is to make it more difficult for those that abuse the system, but not for the standard Steemian.
But I think that trying out some of the possibilities would be both helpful and give some interesting empirical data that might be useful both to this network and to others. It is still time for experimentation.
Haha, so I asked and got it wrong!
Lol
I pray thee, please let the sleeping dog lie. 🙏
👍
Self voting may be justified in some cases. I'm only really using it when I get flagged to make my posts visible again, if I can. I had expected H to retaliate as I had given him some small flags. I cannot seriously dent what he makes, so it was more of a protest. I've seen him flag others to negative rep for daring to criticise him. I may have erred by voting up a meme that could be considered racist, but I thought it was satirical. Anyway, his response was disproportionate. He tried to scare me away. I definitely won't leave steemit, especially after the amazing response I had from the community. There are lots of cool people here. The freedom we have allows for abusing the system and its up to us to deal with that.
Thanks for your support. I hope mentioning H does not get you flagged.
If it does (get me flagged), so be it. Open discussion is one of the benefits of this platform and when that goes down the drain in flagging and petty retribution it devalues the very thing we all are having together. Stupid, and not less so because it is rich and stupid.
I saw that post of Steve, too and I was torn between writing about it in yesterday's #morgenseiten, but then it became to much of a serious topic for me, so I backed down.
It's really interesting to see, if the community is able to find a way to deal with this kind of abuse. If we'd be able to create a commuity, that is self regulating and fair, it might even become a blueprint for a free society.
I'm asking myself, how a free society would handle someone like haejin. Someone who became so powerful, that he'd drain the income of everybody else? And started to be a danger for the whole society...
Probably a free society would have to join forces and concentrate their power to flag him down. But that would also mean, that a lot of (Steem) power would be used for fighting the "enemy", which isn't available for the people anymore.
Changing the rules is always critical for investors, because they want to have a long time safe investment. Also, it's quite unsure, if someone won't be able to find a way to trick the new rules as well.
It feels a bit like a 51% attack right now and looks like the motivation to invest money for a huge ROI is higher, than the motivation to invest for building and ensuring a fair community.
I wonder, if it would be possible to get @haejin on the table with the top witnesses and whales and discuss a solution, that will be satisfying for all involved and for the future of Steem(it).
One wonders if perhaps there could be a "witness council" who step in when someone is abusing the system. They could punish the offender and reward the victim of abuse. That would keep things simple and flexible without major changes.
Just a thought, I'm oblivious of this side of the platform.
Yes, I have been thinking along the same lines. Anarchist governance is always difficult and that is what Steemit resembles the most. At a certain point in its history the freecity Christiania was taken over by pusher-bikers. They still struggle with that. Seems that this is somehow the archetypical development. Bad guys turn up.
The stupid thing is that there is nothing to take over if you devalue the platform... this is mainly like leeching, and that is why I find it reasonable that people get mad and downvote Haijin.
Somehow the individuality of the system defies getting a deal, so I think that you will need a hardfork if you really should solve the problem. Somehow I think that it is time to look at the ways you can vote. The system could easily exist without you being able to vote for yourself and the idea of Vincent is maybe even better as it forces you to distribute your votes even more.
This is really a problem. But as a minnow, a small upvote from whales is much appreciated. While the whales are fighting in their flag wars, the minnows are thriving to do their best to make good posts. @vcelier has a good point also. But it is up to those who are on the top to make it possible. We minnows don't have the power. 😊
Of course it is the people with power who decides, but it is also good to take part in the discussion. Talking always was a way to get influence, even for the poorest minnow.
That's right. Thank you for bringing this issue up. We are educated on what really is happening on the platform. 😊
I hope something can be done about this abuse, Im new to the platform but have invested some real cash into it. I dont want it to fail because of greedy people. I do upvote my own posts, but not comments. We all have our own thinking about this.
Delegating to flagging bots is one way, but a change to the system would be better. I dont know if the latter can be achieved or not.
If your morning stream of consciousness finds a different outlet, that's okay too. Add the tag releaseyourinnerchild (release your inner child) and let go.
I did & @shortcut approved, here is a translation of his German post:
I also saw that he proposed #releaseyourinnerhippie. I am even more happy with that :)
I don't think I can resist using #releaseyourinnerhippie :-)
I saw a self-vote on a post that weighed in at more than $25, and it was the only vote on the post at the time. That's a bit disconcerting to me. I wanted to say something, but it's actually someone whose posts I tend to enjoy and didn't think it was appropriate to start a finger-pointing session. Plus I tend to avoid confrontation here anyway since it can carry some pretty drastic results.
Confronting people who will flag for no reason is not a good idea, but we need to have the discussion. I have not been much involved before, but I will not censor myself on the internet for any reason, so here we go.
Yeah you're right I agree with u : )
People up voting their own post never really bothered me. If someone posted a bunch of things that clearly had zero effort and voted those up to high payouts then most of the community would be against that, but that's about it for me. I don't tend to get on the flagging for reward pool train.
I also understand up votes for visibility and often that takes just a few cents and I didn't really see people complaining about that.
Recently I've noticed trains of comments from some people that up vote all of their own comments apparently as high as they can. They sometimes don't even up vote the post they are responding to, they just dump all of the steem power into their own comments. It is not a sense of entitlement it is more a view that if we all chose to do that this would quickly become a rather unpleasant environment. It could potentially reduce attractiveness of steemit and by extension steem and that impacts all of our investment.
I am all for freedom, yet I am also against things that can give the platform significant negative PR
Can't say I was much bothered by it... or that people earned more than me. It is just an experimental website. But it is also a community, and if people start abusing and attacking peaceful community members I do care.
The information and education contained in this post is invaluable... thank you
Do you care to comment on the actual content? It concerns you too.
All I can induce from this post is that those who go about flagging other people's activity do so to make themselves noticeable and relevant at the expense of other people. The ones who upvote their own comments are no different and I can't understand them either. They all want to make themselves richer and tend to not care about other people.
Another category is the people who just won't upvote or comment no matter how good your content is.
All of these unhealthy business habits must immediately be addressed and pretty soon.
The thing is this. Some very rich profiles are upvoting themselves and each other sucking all the Steem for themselves, accelerating their powerover the platform - these people do not upvote quality posts but just their own mediocre semi generic posts - this unhealthy business habit is addressed by some users who downvote the posts to minimize the the amount - they are then downvoted as revenge, and not because their posts are bad.