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RE: Screw Malicious Flagging: 1 Flag Vs 130+ Votes
The flag was 100% without a doubt malicious, it is the standard weapon of the two parties currently doing the greatest Steem Bank Heist ever pulled.
Upvoting and Flagging weren't enough, now they are greatly influencing witness voting with all that power proxied to the ringleader.
This post was creative and very funny. There is NO WAY that it should have been downvoted. I was vey much pro-haejin camp but now that they are acting in the same way at the B.S. camp I'm backing away. The fault is the system which allows this abuse. Its been tested and the faults highlighted and a redesign is urgently needed.
Flagging should be completely removed. It's not actually effective and causes too much damage. A punishment system doesn't really jive with a "free" and "uncensored" and "decentralized" network anyway.
"decentralized" means there won't be rules to ensure things are "free" or "uncensored", no less fair.
Downvotes are vital to the algorithm that determines how valuable the community as a whole (including each member with their own stake in the platform), deem a specific post.
If you click the flag button, what's the very first reason it gives for potentially flagging a post? "Disagreement with rewards"
This means anyone, for any reason, can upvote or downvote a post. Flags should not be "completely removed"
He said it!
You're my hero.
Or flagging / downvote should cost like on StackOverflow. If you downvote on StackOverflow both the person downvoting and the person being downvotes loose reputation.
As a result you only downvote if the post is so bad that your are prepared to pay the price of the downvote. It still happens because some postings are that bad.
not a bad idea, this is a creative solution to downvotes, even if they cost 10% it would mean something
Just because a subset are hate flagging doesn't mean there isn't a useful purpose for proper flagging. Please, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The only use I can see for flagging is vengeance and retribution. Not exactly the most cherished virtues. If anything it's a band-aid, not a cure.
There may be a good purpose for flagging but in a decentralized blockchain based social media you either have all kinds of flagging or no flags at all. I can write up a program and flag every post that is earning more than say $100 or any criteria the software can detect. Perhaps detect the user's skin color and flag everyone with black skin. That's possible.
If there was a platform like Steem without flagging, I would switch so fast.
You could attach a price tag to downvoting. Then people need to consider: Is the post that bad that I want to pay the price of downvoting.
This was my first thought as well. However imagine someone posted a video of something horrific - a snuff video or child abuse or something. Should there really be a cost associated with flagging that? Is Steemit so inherently a-moral that it wouldn’t put these activities on the same level as any old post or comment you don’t care for, if we made them all cost the same to downvote? I’m still very new here, so I’m not really sure how it all works. It seems like there are lots of people who haven’t been here a long time and know all the lingo and games, but for newbs it’s not really obvious at all.
But those examples are the kind of post where I expect almost everybody being prepared to pay the price of a downvote.
Those examples are so horrid that I expect those with multiple accounts to downvote with every account. No matter the price.
Also the cost of downvote should be in relation to the gain on upvote. A Plankton should be paying far less for the downvote then a wale. That is the only way this idea would work.
Hmm yeah, I guess I'm still too new at all of this to have any real sense for the dynamics, or economics. :D
@tarquinmaine
YESSSS!!!!!!
The simple solution is to change the reward weight to: votingPower * sqrt(SP) so that SP doesn't have a linear effect.
I would even go for a logarithmic weight.
That will not work. If SP has sqrt voting power then anyone can increase their power by about 41% by simply splitting their SP into two accounts, and increase it even more by splitting into more accounts. Only the most aggressive value maximizers (which overlaps somewhat, but not entirely, with abusers) would do this, leaving casual users with even less power.
Having three accounts and doing everything the same on all three accounts is a lot of extra work.
Also it would reduce your author rewards. You can curate three or more times, you can't author three or more times.
I think most people won't bother splitting accounts.
You're probably right, most people won't bother, but abusers trying to maximize their profits certainly will. Which means more voting influence and ultimately more rewards will go to those who game the system, and less to the typical or casual users who don't. There are already bot herders with thousands of accounts. It isn't hard to manage a few more.
BTW, splitting up SP does not hurt author rewards. SP has no influence on author rewards at all unless you self-vote, which can still be done easily by having all of the accounts vote for the posts.
abusers arent most people and for them the extra effort is nothing
I was thinking about this. The Sqrt needs to be applied to the total SP for a post and not individual votes. That is,
Sqrt(v1*sp1 + v2*sp2 + v3*sp3...)and notSqrt(v1*sp1) + Sqrt(v2*sp2) + Sqrt(v3*sp3)When it is applied to the total, the splitting of votes doesn't matter to the payout.
True, however this still rewards splitting votes across posts. How does that matter? This would give far more rewards to self voting, and now self-voters would post more times with smaller votes on each for a larger total reward. Not only does that increase overall reward for gaming the system (and therefore less for everyone else) but it would incentivize posting more spam, low value comments, etc.
That's a great point. But I beleive that can be solved too by the same method. When you calculate the reward for a user, you calculate the total steempower incident on that user across all posts, and then apply
sqrt()on it, instead of calculating for each post separately.I'm not sure what you mean by incident on that user across all posts, but if I understand correctly then the abusers can create many new accounts and have each one only post once (per period). There won't be anything to combine across posts with only one post per account. This is even worse than just spamming because all those new accounts impose overhead too.
There are other implementation issues with this such as the computaitonal overhead of aggregating, the fact that the posts aren't paid at the same time, etc. But those aren't worth getting into because any attempt to impose sublinearity when there is no mechanism to force users to keep their stake in a nice bundle where it can be counted (and therefore penalized) is pointless. And even if it were, It is also very questionable from the perspective of STEEM value whether it makes sense to introduce a strong incentive for anyone who already holds STEEM to sell it and reduce the incentive for anyone who already has some STEEM to buy more. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. The whole premise is looking at things too myopically from the point of view of voting 'fairness' (questionable to me as "one SP, one vote" is also 'fair' in a lot of ways) and losing sight of the fact that everything rests on top of investors attaching a high value to STEEM. If that isn't the case then voting means nothing because you will be voting on nothing but crumbs.
@tarquinmaine I agree, I think flag weight should be calculated on a percentage vs positive votes, and not take into account SP.
How would you deal with multiaccounts then?
It's doesn't not does it take into account bot votes or otherwise inorganic voting. This idea would not work in practice.
Ya, why can't the system simply put a formula taking into the ratio of positive vs negative votes, multiply by the SP of the voter. So if that's only 1 negative vote out of the eventual 100 positive ones, then the SP is 1/100 of the voter. Or else simply just put a limit of the maximum SP one can downvote for a post, regardless of how much SP he has.
because that would let people cheat by smurfing, you cant pit 100 small votes against a major shareholder flagging, the flagger made a big investment in steem and has a right to use each inidividual share freely
Many are saying so but I am of a different opinion. Within a state there should apply rules valid for everybody, rich or poor. To be rich doesn't give you the right to punish or suppress anybody who is poor just for fun for example. The same should apply for the Steemit platform where I think should be implemented some (software) rules to prevent that big accounts damage smaller accounts in an arbitrary way. I have nothing against investors to earn money (actually I am an investor myself), but I am against arbitrary flags or flags with the only intention to damage a certain user.
Furthermore it is true that (money) investors invested money, but it is also true that many other people invested for example much time or thoughts with the aim to improve Steemit. Money isn't everything which counts, and in addition I think that if we are able to create a platform where people like to stay and post and don't feel threatened by arbitrary flags, in the long run that will actually lead to an increase of the STEEM price (and thus would help the investors, too).
I agree!
on steem you can gather riches by taking part even if you are poor, and grow your share in voting
money isn't everything on steem, but share holders decide where the dividends should get spent on, and everyone is a shareholder including you :), its not such a bad system once you aclimate your personal reservations about it.
The problem is if a bigger account randomly (for example because of a different opinion concerning any topic) decides to flag all posts of a smaller account and prevent him from earning anything. Then that has nothing to do with quality of his articles or with preventing spam or plagiarism, but is nothing else than personal hostility.
When talking about Steemit we often hear the word 'censorship-free', but in reality real discussions between bigger and smaller accounts aren't often taking place because the smaller ones fear to get flagged if they defend their point of views too persistently.
What would you think if I decide to flag all your articles from now on? Would you really say to yourself "OK, @jaki01 is the bigger stake holder, he should do whatever he likes with his money which includes flagging me."?
Yes it is a good idea not to interfere too much with the big investors since they own lots of voting shares, it might cause you to have to create a new account to continue making money or square things up with the person who owns a lot more of the network than you do. He has a right to vote for dividends not to reach you, he owns voting shares after all. You can also have voting shares all you need to do is keep posting or invest.
Just remember that if an investor votes for rewards not to pay out for you that voting shares get used to do that, voting shares need to be used for what you believe should be rewarded and not rewarded on steem, its voting, you are indicating that some people have more power than you to vote, yes they do, you can gain more power to vote too.
It's right
Peoples are more creative and having more brainstorming ideas.
Hello Tarquin. THanks for the support.
There are some people with some pretty interesting ideas to improve things around here already.
Cheers
I personally feel this is more of an attitude change needed to be honest @tarquinmaine . However fool proof we can keep improving the system, if the human nature does not change, Steemit will one day turn into FB / an authoritarian or dictatorship run platform controlled by the system.
Hence, no more transparency, no more freedom of speech either.
I am not for the flagging wars, but at least this system is still simple enough to see who are the good hard working people and at the same time transparent to see how ugly offenders are.
(responding to you and @themarkymark 's conversation)
@tarquinmaine it has become a trend of flagging with obvious intentions,
major actions needs to be taken for this.
writing a post is not at all an easy task....flagging is
... Yes... The flagging is being abused like crazy so needs to be redesigned from the top
plsce bro vote me
Hi :)
Thats not the only bad side, look at all the autoflags on this user.
I first saw this post as it was resteemed from one of the parties that is, for lack of a better phrase, on one side of the flag war. I think it was a flag of association. "You are my enemy, I shall attack you and all you decide to support."
Which is a bit sour and sad. It feels like you have a population who exists on here, and it is a large population, who are pushing for a Utopian ideal, and then there is warring faction that is gradually threatening to draw more and more users in to it.
I always wondered what was going to happen to Steemit if voting got driven by political motives. Christ, it'll be a nightmare if it sees the same sort of factional bickering that exists on other social media and forums.
Right now, I don't see anything being done about it. The mantra is "manage it yourselves" and there isn't really a mechanism for that to be done to an effective level right now.
Politics!
It is already happening!!
@spiritualmax
We have seen quite a lot but this kind of stuff starts getting really serious. @berniesanders tries to shout for quite some time but who listens ????
I think we'll see a better mechanism in the future, at least there are some great ideas being thought up.
Cheers
Agreed
I tend to think of something, and then I immediately think of how someone could game it.
I was thinking you could have something called Authoring Power, much like Voting Power. The more you publish, the more the post rewards skew towards the curators. This would see high volume and high reward authors actually give back to the audience a bit more as a default.
That's the simplicity of the Steemit blockchain isn't it?
We handle our own.
Totally our own decision.
Or do we need governance like the Main Stream Social Network?
We have to decide on that.
I agree, we handle it and move on, I prefer freedom of speech
Sadly the guards watching over the bank are effectively wielding foam bats. The robbers literally don't know what's hitting them.
There are no guards, just local militia and they won't come out of their homes.
...cause otherwise monsters outside would eat them.
That's.... kinda anarchy for you.
Anarchy = being eaten by whale predators.
Okay..
Well, it's a system where there is no governing authority to prevent certain behaviors, so people with more power or influence can do what they want, including eating you.
Cool analogies bros.
Yes
Aaaaah. Well now you made me scared. Do you think this will have long-term repercussions? What do you think we can do to solve this problem?
Yes, its a problem I believe will rot the system from inside out. Ability to flag should be earned or at least taken away from anyone miss-using it. The system is wrong as it encourages people to use flagging if they believe the votes are too high. In my opinion if people believe the votes are too high, upvote like crazy the posts you like. It has same effect on reward pool.
yeah, and when they flag the big earners, the reward pool gets redistributed back out to everyone else, including all the spam bots. doesn't solve any problems. Steemit should just implement the system of steemfollower.com and 99% of the problem is solved right away.
Wait. I didn't know steemfollower had such an inner working. Why do you think it would solve the problem for Steemit?
It's right you want to say
Hello, @maksud01. I don't think you're expressing your ideas very well. You might want to put a little more effort in your self-expression skills. :P
I still don't understand how the bots quite work. I though about writing about them but the diversity of who uses them, how they work and why they work I have not quite grasped but I find it oddly fascinating. not sure about them at all. They really seem to stack the decks against us all. but this whole post/ blog / thread is very educational for us newbies / minnows.
This is why every online community, no matter how dedicated to a philosophy of decentralized self-governance or against restrictionism, will always implement some strict form of moderation. Which, of course, always goes swimmingly for the community. Moderators have never overstepped their bounds. Nope, hasn't ever happened.
the need for moderation is severely amplified in the case where there's monetary gains directly involved :(
don't get me wrong, corruption still exists on a platform that has karma that does nothing, but on a platform where you can SELL the karma you get? hoo boy, that's blood in the water
Which will only make it more attractive to be corrupt. The real problem lays in the lack of individual responsibility for one's own experience on the internet. And demanding that other's take charge of their experience. When the site steps in and implements some sort of fix to bad behavior they just wind up making more problems.
Look at @spirtualmax over here, he loses out on a big valuable post. Why? Because the site wanted to put a system in place to help curtail bad behavior, the flagging system. Is he going to be compensated by the site or the person who flagged his post? Of course not. But what happened? The community responded with their votes and their voices and this post far surpassed the one he lost.
The only way for people to have the community they want is to for everyone to step up. If everyone just passes off that responsibility to a few select people those few select people will never do as good a job or be less susceptible to corruption than a self regulated and personally responsible community.
That's pretty well said Mr. Kangoroo!
Thank you mr Max!
Cool cards, btw.
Great points!
Why thank you!
well spoken I agree
Thank you.
I think long term it is going to hurt the platform's success. They are made more powerful by this activity and that isn't going to wane any time soon.
I think you solve this problem
the only thing that stops bots is stuff that also hampers userfriendliness and functionality. we're talking about having to human-verify every time you comment or upvote :P
it's not pretty but it might NEED to be done if people are going to exploit the system
You got that right @themarkymark
I am new here, don't know much about voting, rewards, or coding, but seems to me that the coding could be changed, pending community support, to change how downvotes work?
It seems to me downvoting someone into oblivion is not the point of enabling the down vote function. It was a tool intended to quash malicious content for sure, but not for punative retribution.
Here is what I am suggesting, love to hear your thoughts.
What if downvotes cost the person casting the downvote something, like a stake of their own reputation, or SBD, or something, like what if you only had one per day, and if you used it, there was a commision that voted on whether the content was malicious or not, deserving a down vote, or not.
You could code a means of annonymity into the voting, review, process.
So you down vote me, and it costs me $100.00, or whatever. I "appeal". It goes to a randomly selected group of Steemians, and they can review the material for themselves, and vote to either affirm my original post was "malicious, and deserving of down vote" or they can "overturn the down vote and loss of rewards".
The system could even have a cost to the down voter if they are overturned, like lost SBD or SP, or Reputation.
It could happen with annonymity if coders allowed.
Thoughts?
I am not a coder, I have no idea, maybe there are some unforseen complications with this sugggestion.
Hey, votes are made by share holders, theres nothing wrong with a shareholder using their votes, this autoflag thing sure its bad but its fine, look spiritualmax made his money back and more so there is social workarounds to the problems caused by shareholders using their flags maliciously, all is well in the weird and wonderful world of steem.
all is not well if every incident has to be solved with a public complaint post :(
that's not what anyone wants to see all the time, it's not what this site is truly about
I don't see that working, I could see it become a tool for even more abuse of power.
However, I saw some great ideas already, am thinking of writing a post on how to prevent these things from happening.
One of the most promising ideas is to just make the flagger leave him motive in writting.
I am not a coder either but I like where that idea is going..seems logical .. therefore it will never work lol (that seems to be the norm these days. If it makes sense then nope! not happening. )
I'm agree with you
Thank you for posting
Thank you for commenting.
I've been seeing this for a few days and was wondering what was happening. Turns out is some powerplay. I guess time will tell where this leads. I hope their energy runs out soon, since I'm planning to stay here for a long time. I'm liking this site. It would be a shame to see it drop a lot in quality due to those people.
You're optimist. That's nice.
Need to be an optimist to believe in STEEM right now.
I believe in it as well.
I haven't noticed until now since I've been working a lot, but I hope it'll be turning out well in the end. I have to read more about this. I hope it's not too concerning.
It can still be fixed.
You, I like you... going to send you an invite to my invite-only community.
yeah, we should also respect them though as shareholders and hope that they perform more responsibly in the future, these are basically steems ceos.
I'm not justifying their actions I'm just saying its voting shares after all they help decide where the dividends go.
Yeah, and they're CEO's that the board can never vote out of office.
not entirely true, they have as much stake per investment as you do or I do if you want them out invest 10x what they have and you have a boardroom where they're smaller
votes are dividends awarded to those the shareholders want the dividends to pay out to, if they invested to get a vote let them have it, if you want a stronger vote, invest! ;)
if they no longer want their investment they'll sell it and someone else will hold those shares and decide who steemits dividends get rewarded to, you are also an owner of steem based on your shares.
There is a reason that there are laws in place in corporate structure to prevent the activity that is happening here. Investing 10x what they have isn't a reasonable option because that is millions of dollars that pretty much no one has.
A director of a corporation can have 99% ownership of a company and bleed the company dry to fill their own bank account and what happens? Does someone need to buy their shares from them to make it right? No. They are removed from their position in the interest of the 1% of shareholders by a governing authority. We don't have such a governing authority, so this all comes with the territory, but it doesn't mean it's not going to do severe harm to the platform.
Calling them CEO's is not really accurate, because CEO's exist in a world where they are held accountable by a board of directors, by a governing authority, or the other share holders. Steemit whales are held accountable only to themselves and other whales.
laws are centralized organisation, steem has a decentralised trustless way of organising itself, when it favors stronger votes its just the system working properly, its up to us to learn how to use the system elegantly at this point, for instance you can complain and complain about unfair flagging, but spiritualmax didn't go that route he sorted it out, he got more than his due rewards because of the way humans organise themselves on top of this system.
Expressing outrage at the system being heartless favoring voting power is fine I was outraged when I joined, I don't see it that way any more I want to have some steem power and vote what I belive in, if ranchorelaxo believed in flagging posts bernie sanders shares thats his right while he holds shares, its not a profitable activity so he wont do it forever, there really is no problem here.
hey @reidlist I think your ideas are quire thoughtful, followed :)
the problem seems to me that the more power they accumulate, the faster they accumulate more yet. the rest of us somehow doing something about it seems unfeasible.
Abuse is abuse, whether they created it or not.
they didn't create steem, they invested in it, you are also co-owner of the platform based on your holdings, and you have as much right as they do to decide what those voting shares vote for.
:D:D:D Steem CEOs :D:D:D. They found that with ~1million$ investment they can profit something around 4million$ a year. Incredible ROI. And they are cashing out.
yes steem is a profitable investment, you can probably make 4x a year on your investment at the current network size, whether you invest 10$ or 1 000 000.
That is a good thing, start investing and using your shares to vote what you believe in.
check out my protest song to the flag wars
https://steemit.com/openmic/@lanmower/steemit-open-mic-week-88-original-moonshine-just-vote
Better move quickly or after the bubble bursts you might be left with monopoly money. Or u think that the current steem ecosystem valuation of 1.3+ billion $ reflects reality? Or that this nonsense here attracts any serious investors?
Nah, what that group or individual managed to do is pretty awesome.
And here is how you can replicate it:
Post ten times a day on astrology. That topic attracts a lot of crazies. And you always want to have crazies on your side. During that time start creating an army of bots, cus a robot army is even better. Then buy enough steem power so you can make a dent in the reward pool. Investment also has to be large enough so the platform creators leave you at your business. Nobody fucks with a person who just gave them almost million dollars. Now, when you feel the time is right, start printing money. If somebody opposes, direct your army at their direction. But you have to move fast because when the platform fails, your initial investment might be in danger.
gg ez
yes thats a way to make the dividends pay out in your favor, which as a share holder you should be able to do
it is discouraged, perhaps even inconvenient to reward yourself on steem, which I think is enough, you should not force people to not get the dividends for their shares, you should just encourage them be social and to give it to other people by voting, if they really want to get the dividends themselves they should, because they invested in the first place, why do you think steem allows you to vote your own post in the first place?
I dont see the problem. It seems to me that people add their own rules to the system, like getting the rewards for your investment is bad, if every voting share they have goes into paying out themselves, thats fine, its the dividends for their shares which would only be worth what it is thanks to the investors.
erm, I might have come across a bit direct there, I dont feel very strongly about these views I express here even if I come across that way, I just admire the way it works
It makes sense actually.
A lot of variety of different unique people here on Steemit. As always the saying has its own way "YOU CAN"T PLEASE EVERYONE"
@themarkymark
Would you be able to name the two parties? I'm curious
Always somebody pulling crap
Perhaps steemit calculation works that way because the creators want you to feel like a boss at the top not considering abuse.