You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Will Flagging Ultimately End up Killing the Steemit Platform?
I fully agree, and I've been saying the same thing for 18 months now - flagging is total bullshit and needs to go, but some of the most powerful people on Steemit are REALLY into it - at this point there is full blown censorship going on but we have clowns excusing it by saying it's not censorship because you can still see the post if you unhide it. Not censorship my arse...
https://xkcd.com/1357/
35 people in this community agree with me, which is why they upvoted this post. The only thing that you have going for you is that you can soft-censor people, and boost your own comments with your massive amounts of wealth.
As soon as people learn that Steemit is engaged in soft-censorship, they will sour against the platform very quickly. You need to be careful, your going to end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The word isn't out yet completely. However, once the word gets out, I can guarantee you, that many will simply leave. You ought to be even more concerned about the people who will never join because of the soft-censorship.
I don't know if you hate your job, or if you hate Steemit, or what the deal is. The fact of the matter is that Americans absolutely abhor censorship, and the snowflake minority is just that, a minority.
So yeah keep it up man, we'll see what happens, I'm predicting right now, that people like you will destroy this platform. The fact that you are a dev only serves to magnify the issue.
Pfff, @thoughts-in-time you really don’t understand what censorship is. I suggest you look it up in a dictionary.
I called it soft-censorship, what would you call it when your post gets hidden from view? Do you have a better terminology that you would suggest? "Flagged" is the action of marking something. However, the result of the flag, where the post becomes hidden, what would you call that, other than soft-censorship?
Oh so is it like soft-porn? Still porn, but soft?
The post or comments are collapsed but still visible. Any user who wants to check them, has a freedom to do so. It’s not even close to censorship.
The platform is filled with spammers, who use plagiarized content to profit. Don’t be surprised when couple of days later somebody will copy and paste your article to pass for their own. The only thing you can do about it is flag it to show your disagreement. There is no way to erase anything from the Steem blockchain, unlike on other platforms like Facebook, etc.
Steem is decentralized and that’s the blessing and the curse of it. I suggest you first read the white paper and learn more about the technology behind Steem before writing something so, err how to put it politely, meaningless.
Well, thanks for being polite. Yes like porn, but soft. Don't get me wrong, I think there should be a mechanism in place for spammers, and plagiarizers.
Yet, the problem with putting soft-censorship in the hands of anyone is that they tend to abuse it. They tend to simply down vote posts because they don't like the message.
Even you down voted this post because you didn't like the message. It wasn't spam, I wrote it. I sourced anything that I didn't write, or create. So with your flagging action how else am I supposed to interpret anything other than you simply didn't like what I have to say.
Do you really think Steemit needs to become like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Do you think we need that censorship-esque nonsense?
I did read parts of the white paper, what I found particularly curious was page 16 last paragraph.
It reminded me about that whole controversy that facebook was facing when Sean Parker came out to reveal the fact that they were exploiting a vulnerability in the human psyche.
I have flagged it because you don’t understand what censorship is. Trust me, I come from Russia, earlier Soviet Union. Perhaps you should start using busy.org, another interface with the blockchain. Posts and comments which were flagged don’t collapse or change colour, but left as is. Plus you simply don’t understand the technology. Please study it first before writing something like this and I will happily remove my flags.
Thanks for the tip about busy.org. For some reason I thought that busy was a Stemmit app.
Yet if it's an independent app running on the Steem blockchain that doesn't censor, then it might be my solution.
I'm not sure that I'm willing to concede that hiding posts from view, because you don't like the message is not a form of censorship.
Legal Dictionary:
I think when you do an action on a platform, that causes the post to be hidden on that platform, that it in fact is a form of suppression.
It may not be as ugly, or as violent as some of the things you may have witnessed from soviet Russia, but it seems like soft-censorship to me.
If I weren't on the Steemit platform, and unable to take those extra steps to first unhide a post, and unhide the images. That's when it would move from soft-censorship, to censorship.
But hey, we live in different countries and have different ideas about things. I can respect the fact that we have different opinions, or ideas about what is what.
I live in America, and although I might ridicule someone if they had a bad idea. I'd never place a road closed sign in front of their driveway in order to prevent other people from visiting them.
Are you kidding me? That's not a reason to flag a post. Just educate the poster instead. If they don't listen and are continuing to spread misinformation then maybe it would be justified.
Downvoted for unfair censorship!
Thanks for dropping in @sift666. Yeah, anyone saying it's not censorship is simply hiding behind semantics. They can't wriggle out of the fact that it is indeed at the very least soft-censorship, and that it's ugly as hell every time it's done to a non-spam, non-bot post.
I can already tell what's going to happen here. They're going to lose, another, better, platform will spring up that doesn't censor, and that'll be that. The market picks and chooses, and it's a finicky market. I remember when MySpace nerfed themselves with the shitty redesign that everyone hated, everyone stopped using it and migrated to facebook.
Now Facebook's reputation, and censorship tactics have become so bad that people are jumping ship from that platform too. Especially after the acknowledgement from their former devs about how they deviously planned to get people psychologically addicted. I fear it is only a matter of time, the sand is dropping through the hour glass. When Steemit censorship becomes so rampant that the memes turn against them, that'll be all she wrote.
You can fool people that censorship isn't censorship with psychological gymnastics for only so long. Yet this type of foolery doesn't actually convince them, in their heart they know, it's censorship. It would only take a few clever dank ass memes to expose that fact, and that kind of magical meme power is the equivalent to one little boy saying: "the king has no clothes". Everyone knew, but they didn't know they knew. The blinders had to be removed, and it's not a difficult task to accomplish.
It would be nice if they would abolish this practice, because it's the right thing to do. And of course their is the whole reward side aspect of it too, and I don't know how that plays into it. Where the rewards go, and whatnot. Say one large downvote subtracts 50.00 voting power for a given amount of time, and also redirects 50.00 in rewards. I don't know if their is some hidden benefit that someone like a lead programmer might be taking advantage of via that method or not. Anything in that realm would be out of my ability to comprehend at this point.
Just seems really odd for a dev to be acting like this.
I think there is some really odd stuff going on behind the scenes and as a big fan of Steemit I hesitate to start talking about my mad theories - they are paranoid and negative, and if they are true I have no solutions.
Lets just say that some people would be in a very powerful position if there was a shift from Steemit to a new platform - this could be a very dirty race - are we seeing flagging or dragging?
We really ought to get a group going. We're all reasonable here and can differentiate between wild speculation to prospect new possibilities (no matter how unlikely). And actual evidence based documentatuion of massive wrongdoing that could endanger the whole platform. Finding the catch is not a game, it's a duty of free thinkers who have been had one too many times.
followed.