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RE: To Solve The Whale DownVote Crisis Why Not Have A Curation System Tied To Reputation Instead?
Are you taking a break or breaking free of steemit and going somewhere else?
I'm curious as to what prompted your decision, if I may.
Yip, I am taking a break but don´t know if/when I will be back. Currently I am powering down.
There are too many negative people around here, and to me steemit has lost great part of its fun character lately. I´m tired of it.
My very last article tried to explain my decision just in case you wanna read it :)
But that´s my single point of view / opinion. There may be still a lot of users enjoying their time here. Active user numbers are not increasing currently. But maybe the marketing efforts will bring the big revolution...
Thank you Terry, that's cute.
But I need my (will) power for other projects now.... and for surfing of course ;-) Have a good time!
The post was a very valuable perspective indeed.(get ready for my wall of words! :D)
Some of the comments were expressing the same concerns that I sought to address with my suggestions: large accounts throwing their weight around, deincentivized of downvoting such accounts/actions (no curation from that, wasted voting power) and the negative proponent of retaliation, along with the shield of SP that protects such bad actors, but I went further and made suggestions trying to address gangstalking, griefing, and group downvoting/flagwars.
Your post about trolls is echoing a one of my values: stand up and to voice your concern when you see something wrong and confront that behavior.
The thing is that some people are simply psychopathic, that study doesn't seem to take that into account. I will describe one instance where the person(troll) wasn't bored but possibly borderline psychopathic.
In 2011 I followed a page on facebook which was posting different sages and I would comment on Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi quotes and because of those comments I got added to numerous groups on enlightenment and consciousness/self discovery. It was probably because of the comments popularity, usually I would explain my take on the quote and the truth I found in them. After being in those groups and talking about my understanding and experiences and raising questions about some of the teachings the groups were promoting I had a couple experiences where two group founders ended up removing me from the groups, granted they added me to begin with, I was possibly taking away their popularity or because I was questioning their "teachings". What had happened next is that I was placed in this one Enlightenment group which was NO BAN group of mostly renegades and people kicked out of other groups for their sense of humor or attitude towards the subject. As in the other groups people would be generally very supportive of my thoughts and perspective. For about 7-8 months the group was engaged in a lot of discussions and it was a great place to discuss most everything, granted I was always in the background in starting discussions, as I didn't feel like bring into the group the discussion about numerous negative things I tried to shed light on my wall, such as pedophilia in high places/child hunting parties, the thin blue line/cop violence, false flag attacks/media manipulation, and the numerous scandals within the intelligence alphabet soup community and general government/global corporations, and anarchist philosophy which questioned the immorality of the state. I didn't do that since those people were discussing things on the whole pertaining to self knowledge and experiences from that or everyday things, a lot of positive and encouraging subjects, I would participate in their threads and give my support or criticism.
Since it was a no ban group had one vulnerability, and that was that the principle they thought would be it's best defense turned out to be a double edged sword that would fall back on the group when a certain prolific bad character somehow was added to it, since it was an invite only group. This person was a known troll, and on facebook especially in those communities I think there was no reason to get bored with numerous topics to be explored, but he managed to troll incessantly, calling people names and other personal attacks, spamming and resorting to faking profiles, even acting as a woman and trying that route of trolling I believe in order to befriend people and extract personal information them to probably use it in efforts to damage their character/attack them.
So what had happened is that because of my principle I challenged his behavior every instance I could, that was before he even got added to the group but even more so after that as there was no comparing this group to others, the people made it a very pleasant and supportive place. First I started by asking why he was acting like this, and following it up by then exposing his petty and selfish reasons when he explained, then when that didn't stop him I would simply expose what he was saying from my perspective which was to laugh at his trolling, in every instance he would retreat and come back with a new angle, he finally resorted to copying and trying to adapt my method and integrate it into his trolling, which turned into a giant fail as I would simply point that out and crack a joke about it. I should also mention that one of the central people in the group had asked a mystic to rate everyone in the group on their enlightenment, and to me any everyone's surprise I got proclaimed the most enlightened LOL, which made me his number one target, that is when he diverted his attention to infiltrating the group with a fake woman profile. Did he get a raise out of me or anyone, not even close, people would usually ignore him, some would entertain him and then he would attempt to become their master and expound life lessons, but that never lasted as he couldn't maintain the facade for long and was prone to outbursts. He wasn't getting entertainment out of us, only pity and being the butt of numerous jokes. Of course regardless of that his numerous accounts and certain people's sympathy for his deranged ramblings turned the group into a very stale place indeed, and in that he took pleasure I believe, just like a psychopath prays on division/fracturing of a group, he saw that his noise was affecting everyone and his pleasure wasn't in watching the reactions or lack of such, but the growing disillusionment of the people with the group as a whole. I decided that there was something that could work, I made it my mission to make my interactions with him a sort of epic battle of slaying the dragon(psychopaths love enlarged personas, this he welcomed by playing right into it).
Each interaction I would narrate as such and entertain the people with it, creating engagement and anticipation in people for each new fight. I stopped laughing at his noise outright and that was working, the last straw that broke the camels back and got him booted out of the community (a couple sister groups were brought down by his incessant 10+ account trolling) was when he couldn't stand to see this slow regeneration, and began spamming everything with my words that he would flip a little, then it wasn't long before he got the boot. The point is that we have the choice to walk way, or to ignore, even to question/reason, or to entertain and to confront, and there isn't one formula as some are simply bored but some are pervasive and psychopathic, but there are other effective ways to deal with those behaviors, such as a system that gives us tools to effect policing better than what we have here, in this NO BAN group, that is only a double edged sword and it can fall back and damage the community.
Thanks for taking the time to share this experiences with us here. People like the one you described find amusement in their doings. They need the reaction to stay alive. That's what I criticized here on steemit. Many people wrote articles about people who started attacking them. Why? Why giving them any stage? I remember that I informed the famous abuse channel about somebody flagging some time ago. You know what reaction I got from there: none.
That's why I am leaving basically. It's Ok that people don't understand that they can't fight a troll by reacting on him and giving him an even wider stage, writing about him, complaining, talking about him.... But I definitely can't understand why the ones that supposedly dominate this platform in a positive sense don't create a place where to seriously help the attacked people. Well that's not correct. I somehow understand it. It's because they just don't care ;-)
The motivation of the troll is secondary. It's the way of dealing with these creatures that counts. On steemit they have found the perfect place to be.