I am being bot flagged by @bloom. I thought it was just specific topics but it isn't.
It appears that @bloom wants to be a good example of "diversity" by squashing any thought that he/she/zir/they/it don't like. I first began getting flagged on some climate change, vaccine, etc type topics. I thought that it was likely they just like to silence any discussion about those topics as heresy cannot be allowed.
It turns out I was wrong. I wrote a philosophical piece about floating something nice on a sea of complaints the other day which was none of these topics and was a general philosophical piece. That was flagged as well.
Then after a long hiatus I spent well over three hours yesterday doing a news aggregation piece on @newsagg. I didn't advocate for anything in general on that just shared the actual headlines, including from leftist leaning sites. Flagged.
In addition, that flag typically ends up being the largest vote on any of my posts.
I intend to keep posting, as I do it a lot of the time because it is like a word bug that won't leave me alone in my own head until I give it creation. I likely won't be doing @newsagg. I can read the news myself in a fraction of the time it takes me to make one of those posts. I was doing it anyway to help the rest of you out by aggregating from many different sites into one place. I cannot justify spending 2-3 hours every day to do that.
@bloom may see that as a victory. Really it is just me saying "Screw your church". :)
Got your back buddy :)
Actually, keep posting. If the bot is automatically downvoting, it'll sap their voting power in a hurry, rendering their downvotes worthless.
Oh I will keep posting. Yet I won't be spending hours formatting something super nice and such when I can't justify that time. If I didn't have other things I needed to do, I'd do it anyway. Yet, I am one of those people (like many people) that has far more things to do than I have time. :)
I did post another post on @newsagg just now that is an example of how I might do things going forward. Pick a topic. Aggregate on it. Do less formatting... etc. In the traditional @newsagg I cover a ton of topics in a single post.
That's not something I usually have to deal w/very much, or understand completely. Just know I got your back w/an up-vote like most. Don't let this twat get to ya!
Resteemed mate, there are many that have been targeted by that cretin.
Anyone who sets up a bot to flag decent creators for a difference of opinion is a prize twat in my book.
Cue flag.....
Hey I'm happy to see a comment from you! How is it going? When are your great stories back on the chain?
Hey Roberto,
I’m all good thanks mate, I drop the odd comment now and again.
No plans to post any work here for the foreseeable, but never say never....
Gotcha I hope that everything is good on your end. I'm trying my best to make the most of the bear market and continually growing and helping others as I can.
To bad, I miss your posts/research to be honest...
👊😎
Thanks. It is appreciated.
flagging and bots.
the two things about Steem that indicate that steem is a scam.
The only thing that is somewhat effective when it comes to bots and computers is a captcha or recaptcha type thing. That is the only thing that might be able to curtail bots. The problem is that steemit is just a front end, a captcha is just a front end. The bots can interface directly with the blockchain so making captchas and such wouldn't impact them at all.
Not really a scam in terms of bots. Just human nature. Power corrupts. Greed. Envy. You name it. We don't really have a programmatic way to stop bots on the blockchain yet. In fact, as a programmer I can tell you mimicing human behavior and clicks is easy. If you try to program against it, it is easy to circumvent and whatever you come up with is also likely to false identify actual people as bots.
So that aspect is a connundrum.
Though, I am not happy about the flags. I understand WHY they have them but I believe they are abused and used to attack others rather than being any kind of positive here on steem.
until flags and bots are made impossible on the steemchain...it will just remain a sidechain.
It will NOT be mainstream.
There is no chain that doesn't have bots. Bots work on every form of Crypto. So by your statement it will likely always be a sidechain, but then so will all others.
As you can't make bots impossible.
If a human can follow instructions to do something on a computer, a bot can be made to follow those same instructions.
EDIT: Flags though could be removed. But then consider those with power could create an up vote network of ONLY their stuff and keep building up and increasingly funnel the pool to their accounts. Right now the only thing that CAN counter that if and when it happens is flagging. That was the problem Dan Larimer and I were talking about when he finally convinced me that the flag needs to stay as it is currently the only stop gap to other forms of exploitation. The problem is that this doesn't prevent people from abusing the flag. Since it is decentralized there is no central authority that acts as policemen. The idealistic approach here was that the community would police such things. Though human nature and the way power is handled on the chain quickly subverts and corrupts that idea.
I was an advocate for removing the flag. Until I started imagining ways I could exploit the system if I was a scumbag if the flag wasn't there.
To truly address it you would need some sort of governance. Yet we have the old human nature problem of how do you keep the governance from becoming corrupt.
A lot of issues we have not even solved outside of the blockchain.
Though making bots impossible. No one has solved that anywhere. Captchas and Recaptchas can make them much more difficult to write, but that only works currently on centralized services with a front end people MUST go through. If you have a chain with an APIs and other means of accessing it to facilitate many things that have nothing to do with a front end then making bots is much easier. Someone could try to put something like captchas or recaptchas into the blockchain itself but that would result in slowing the chain down to the pace of a slug.
The truth is bots are interacting with every chain. Just most chains are not carrying social media data that people subjectively upvote/downvote.
Personally I'd like there to be no DOWNVOTE/FLAG for content. I'd like it only to exist for policing fraud, abuse, etc.
Yet without some centralized governance who decides what is fraud, and what is abuse?
from what you say the future of steem is looking bleaker every day.
Not only steem. This is a problem we still are fighting with in our realities outside of steem. It is why all the idealistic and nice sounding ideas tend to only work for a short term before they are corrupted.
Many humans love to game systems.
We haven't come up with a sure fire way of addressing these things outside of computers. Things move a lot faster on computers, so what we see happening at a slower pace outside of computers simply happens much faster inside them. It does make it more apparent. Yet it also can drown us with how much of it we see.
It is why I don't claim to think anarcho-capitalism is feasible right now. While it is the most beautiful idea for a future (Utopia) that I currently know of, it is also not realistic because of these things in human nature.
The only answer to that is education, I mean true education, critical thinking, morality, ethics, etc. Yet, it is clear that those calling the shots on education want none of that.
Something like Steem with a central authority that polices it would likely work for awhile. At least until that central authority was corrupted like every other central authority I am aware of.
Here is an example:
A new product like steem is launched with a statement that we will NEVER down vote your content due to the topic of the content or your opinions.
Allow people to FLAG (without monetary, or visibility effect) and those flags would accumulate. A central authority would then be able to look for fraud, abuse, plagiarism and the flags would be like a priority queue to help them identify such things.
Now how they deal with that. Should they have the ability to remove such posts? Should there be a reputation system where confirming such activities begins to penalize accounts with a bad reputation some how?
Such a thing could work for awhile. Then the old "who polices the policemen" issue arises.
We haven't even solved that outside of computers.
So "doomed to fail". That is hard to say "doomed to be corrupted" is likely always true. The question how long does it take for that to happen, and do you happen to be able to operate there and enjoy it before it is corrupted?
There is no 2nd amendment for the chain. Yet we can choose to LEAVE. If we have the means we can choose to try to create a competing environment. Eventually that is likely to be corrupted as well.
It would be nice to be able to stop that. If we could do that we could actually solve most of the world's problems.
I did add a big edit to that reply by the way. You may not have seen it.
Restemeed for visibility and hopefully it will get settled down soon. Have a good one!!!
Posted using Partiko Android
....yeah, I had a week of everything being flagged , a while back...
keep posting
I'm changing my @newsagg format to something more simplified for me... so the net result is I may post MORE posts instead of single large posts.
that is a much better idea, it will save you work and drain the bot.