Voting Collusion, Flags, and Concerns... Opinion
My growing concerns regarding the short to mid-term sustainability of Steem. Market corrections will likely handle long-term problems.
Voting Collusion While cooperation to distribute funds to the best work is the desired goal, collusion that undermines this objective should be minimized. There are two kinds of collusion , the most straightforward is when one user simply buys a larger stake than others, and the other involves coordinating a large number of smaller stakeholders to work together. Larger stakeholders can have the voting influence of 100 or even 1000 smaller stakeholders which means they have even greater incentive to defect by voting for themselves than they had under a linear distribution. Regardless of how much money any one individual has, there are always many other individuals with similar wealth. Even the wealthiest individual rarely has much more than the next couple wealthiest combined. Furthermore, those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves.
Source: Original Whitepaper - SteemIt
I am a firm believer in your stake is your stake and you can do what you want with it. I also believe that some of the problems we are having currently were predicted. The idea with stake is it works for both flagging and upvoting.
Yes, everyone can use their stake how they want, but that does not mean we can ignore those who are using their stake to take out as much money as they possibly can. I don't care if you buy or sell votes or help your family and friends, but like with anything there is a limit to what we can afford to drain out of a young platform.
If the large stakeholders will not counter the other large stakeholders, it doesn't work. Well intentioned or not it becomes a sort of ponzi scheme.
My concern is that we are letting some really big accounts take out more than what is good for the future economy of Steem.
One option several people are proposing is community flagging bots, which at first seems like a good idea.
However: No, I do not wish to delegate my stake to a community flagging bot, unless it has major whale support. After all as is often brought up they have the most to lose or gain. If they do not address the problem it will catch up to us in the price.
Non-Linear Rewards:
Can someone please figure out what Haejin and Sweetsssj's friends and family will be taking out if we made that change? Because I think it will be much worse. You can change the math, but if you don't solve the problem you just "move" it.
*spoiled stake attracts flies.
The tools we have at this time are flags, our voices and transparency. The question isn't can we stop abuse, the question is will we?
*Each user, including whales can only allocate their own share using votes, but that does mean we have to strike a balance between supporting those who create an economy and those who are just funneling Steem out of the system.
What are your thoughts?
80/20. 20% a day to flag, 80 to up. That's my plan when I become a dolphin.
I love the idea of having a set amount for flags, which we can choose to use or not. There is not enough flagging because of the fear of retaliation though.
I think about it like that also. I don't actually do the math, but I try to spend some percentage of my voting power each day on obvious abuse.
I have tackled this problem few days ago with my article.
Basically a came to a conclusion that every user has to choose a battle that he can win and proceed with flags. It’s pointless to have someone like bernie flagging puny spamming accounts (that can be flagged by us), instead the whales have to counter the abuse of whales...if that won’t happen Steem is bound to lose value as long as haejin and sweet (and their likes) will continue to rape the reward pool. All the whales that are IGNORING the matter are SUPPORTING the matter, because there are only handful of them that can counter abuse of such a scale.
My humble opinion is that the whales are underestimating the matter. They feel like Steem is prospering so there really isn’t anything too wrong with it. I on the other hand think that we currently are in Altcoin bubble (slowly popping at the moment) and that Steem will soon be at around 1 dollar again...maybe even lower. This conclusion is based on the premise that users do search around the platform before investing heavily and as soon as they spot those worthless trending "celebrities" they will realize that it’s really not that much about quality of the content for now.
I don't know. I don't even have enough money to upvote all the good articles.. I can't go downvoting the thieves and plagarists. It's hard to find a clear cut path to do it. Delegate to Hendrix? Then there goes some of my Steem to upvote worthy posts. How I'd the best way of going about it would you say?
I rarely downvote for this reason, there are too many struggling to have their goodnposts noticed that I can’t justify using my 24 cents to downvote someone. If I had a larger upvote and the ability to really do a dent in a scammers post I might do more on the flagging front but I’d still wish to use a majority of my voting power on upvoting, not on flagging.
I hear you. I think smaller accounts should probably stick with flagging a spam comment here and there.
I think there is a terrible and deserved fear of flagging. I don't want each user to spend all day looking for things to flag, but if each person, especially those with eyes on the site, cleaned one or two things up as they go... We would have the newer users trained to meet some expectations before their accounts get larger.
I don't want the small users having to try to clean up the large accounts, that was meant to be done by the other large accounts.
I am really calling out the whales on this post! Do some cleaning, dang it! :) And I don't mean cause drama, I mean just pull out your flag and use it.
I am on Steemit little more than a month. My SP is still small, but already has attained a reputation of 50. I think it's not bad for a month. During this time I have seen a lot of users and lot of posts. What struck me, everyone says, write quality posts and you will be happy. So what? I see a lot of really good posts that don't get anything. And then post with one photo and place text and wow, he cleans up. When the eyes of a beginner see this picture, he concludes. And he rarely comes to the conclusion, that it is necessary to continue to work hard, to write interesting posts. He will think, that he can buy the voices of the bots. Yes, you can make money here. But first of all, it is a platform for exchanging information and expressing opinions. Those who have power can influence it. First of all, these are flags. After all, a lot of spam, not only in posts but also in comments. People are not afraid to write outright nonsense, because they will not be anything for it. I really want this platform to develop, I think that each post has its own audience, but it should not be spam. I will continue to do my job here and hope for attention.
Yes @naditinkoff. I agree with you. It is discouraging to write a good, well-thought-out post and not get many votes and then see a minimal post get lots. A lot of people drop out because of this. I am glad you have continued. Me too.
Minnows and dolphins can only help as positive reinforcement, that is, supporting those who do a good job and contribute to the community, but only the whales have the real power to punish those who abuse the system, because although everyone has the freedom to place flags on the content that seems negative, flagged people usually take this as an insult and try to take revenge, distorting the whole system of voluntarist community. So, only the whales have the power.
Commenting to ping this and come back later to properly comment.
It's such a difficult one because the spread of wealth is the same as almost every walk of life, with a small percentage of users controlling a huge percentage of the overall stake. When we have users abusing the platform it's all well and good for 1000 minnows to chime in and downvote, but one whale upvote still dwarfs them. They are also the ones who's rep can be totally destroyed by whales as has been seen in retaliation voting earlier this year. It's hard not to have that fear when your downvote is little more than symbolic. Unfortunately the abusers of the system are very unlikely to listen to reason, yes, they have the most to lose long term. But I don't believe any of the real abusers are in this for the long term. Unfortunately if no whales step up it will get to the point that they run this platform to the ground, gaining almost total control for themselves and pummeling the value with it.
If they drive the price down, and I agree they will. It is a great entry point for others to buy in. With our current ability to manage the content, we are likely over valued at this point.
It is a very complex problem, because first of all I don't believe the people who do this think it is wrong, they have a large stake and getting money from it is what they think should happen, so the simple answer would be to make them realize what they are doing is wrong, but actually I don't think this would work. Second flagging doesn't seem to be working, and also its scope is limited not only the two people you mention do this, so you would have to have a huge VP for the flags to mean anything, and that would also be wasting VP. Third you could implement a ban on people who do this, but they could just make a new account and it would be an endless chain of the same event. So the solution is also far from easy, I know I don't have it, but at least I can visualize the problem.
It really is pretty complicated. Which is why I think calm discussion is part of the process. I also don't think they are "Wrong". I just think it isn't good for the platform's growth. Maybe they just do not care.
Do you be able to mention the name of these proposed community flag bot projects you are noting?
I ask that because I am working on something similar to that however characterizing it as a bot would not really give it justice. It's more of a communal flag account whereby people reecharge their right to up to a 100% flag in proportion to their delegated or donated SP via a flag console. We are concurrently working on ways to minimize the risk profile to delegators.
I know you weren't a fan of @steemflagrewards but we have already made a believer of at least one of the people who had doubted my intentions when we got into it in the chat room. (No hard feelings btw)
If I could make a believer out of you, I would say the sky is the limit as you seemed most closed to the concept of a community flag incentivization system. I'm not certain I understood the rationale of your doubts and would appreciate any clarity you may afford.
I have noted Steem possessing Ponzi-esque elements in previous comments and do not think accounts running the schemes are getting any weaker despite how much they cash out compared to those that believe in Steem for the long term who earn through honest and productive means.
You can keep doing the lone wolf flagging and pretend like organized flag alliances (or flag club in your words) have no utility but there may come a day yet where you realize that it will not be enough to repel the advances of our mutual enemies, the short sighted reward pool rapists.
Any effective project is going to need whale support, I recommend you start there. I mentioned this in the post and when you pitched the idea before as well.
I think I saw a post pitching flag-a-whale, yesterday, pulling that from memory, so it might not be the accurate name.
@whatsup
Thanks for the advice. You're absolutely right. My plan is to have some form of a working demo when I pitch it to large stake holders who may be interested. I've tested the waters with a number of people on discord as well as the initial couple posts and there seems to be some interest. Think there could be demand if implemented properly.
Yep. You got it. Well, cat's out of the bag now. FAW is the project. It ain't shit right now but neither was SFR which people seem to be appreciate now (has plenty more work needed. I).
I put in a lot of time and if nothing else this will be an opportunity for me to learn some cool shit and make some abuse fighting friends along the way.
Also, I wanted to clarify that Flag-A-Whale is a bit of a misnomer. Just thought it was a clever name at the time because of abuse from a few notable whales. Of course, abuse occurs on all spectrums of SP holding and will be intended to flag any abuser no matter where they fall in the peking order. More than anything, it is intended to be deterrent against people trying to get junk posts to Trending. In theory, this would improve quality of content.
My thoughts are, if we know we are going to limited the amount of reward going out to these big users, then why all the $900 on their post?, I believe this is a problem from the genesis, milking a whole lot of people to get to those large amount is preposterous, I guess even no body wants to risk their delegation to support, maybe a flagging bot.
However the future of steemit is at stake, we must all know that sharing the reward pool unequally will make done people drain the system, it's too much the future of some people lies here on steemit and the guys are draining it.
It maybe hard but I think reward pool sharing should cease to be unequally, that way the community can survive