The elephant in the room you don't see until it steps on you or someone near you...

Steemit and steem are a great thing. They are also a very new thing. There are SOME places where we can make historical comparisons to what it is. Yet, in reality it is a hybrid of many concepts and as such that makes it a totally new thing that there really is no historical precedent. This means there are also a new set of problems that have never been encountered before in history. We as the community as well as the developers of the blockchain and various websites and apps like Steemit will need to seek solutions to issues that have not really ever existed in quite the hybrid combination that they are found here.

Source: WondersList

I want this to be a more positive post. I've had enough negative ranting posts on the topic here in the past, and calling for people to change behavior, expressed my concern over negative PR implications and such.

There are A LOT of new people though and you were not involved in the cycles of discussing these issues.

Please keep in mind that EVEN with these blemishes that we haven't implemented a solution for yet Steem and Steemit are still the best community on the internet in terms of social discussion, dialog, and creativity inspiration that I am aware of.

Eventually it is unavoidable that you will notice something. The down vote (aka flag) and the negative impact it can have on perceptions. This is more a perceptual thing.

This site and project are billed as being anti-censorship. Technically this is true as you cannot delete anything from the steem blockchain. It is there if you are willing to look at the blockchain with tools that can see everything.

The steem blockchain is truly a wonderous thing. People can design websites to view that data however they want. If for example you wanted to move an online newspaper off of its current host and onto the steem blockchain you could move that data over as blog posts, and you could build your news website to ONLY show posts from people that work at the newspaper. In such a case people like us using steemit.com would see their news posts mixed in with the rest of steem posts. However, people visiting the news website could get essentially a customized view that ONLY showed their articles. This means you could move traditional websites based around blogging, news, etc to the steem blockchain and your customers and business could benefit from being part of the steem ecosystem with voting, rewards, rewarding your readers, etc.

So that is a positive. It also explains why people argue you cannot censor things. The data is there, you simply need a way to see it. However, most of us for the time being will tend to use the flagship website steemit.com. There are already alternatives such as esteem, and busy.org.

The problem comes in when you see a post voted into oblivion that is not plagiarism, is not spam, and is not abusive. The only problem appears to be that some person(s) with a lot of steem power decided for some reason they didn't like the post. So if there is a big enough ding it will hide the post in some sense due to their down vote. It will be there, but grayed out and lower visibility unless some people with sufficient reputation come along and rescue it by up voting it. This is only one side effect though. Another thing some people may view as censorship if say they are a newspaper like above is that the potential reward for that post could be forced to $0 or greatly reduced. If the funding is important to being able to produce what is being produced then that could effectively end such a publication. "You are not censored", "I can't afford to keep doing it for free", "If you are here for the money you're here for the wrong reason", "This is what I do for a living, don't you want as many people as possible to use this platform", "We can do without some people", "Okay, I'll let my subscribers know why I am not using this platform". That is just me making up a dialog of back and forth between a person who was down voted and the person that down voted him. They usually are not that pleasant.

The problem is this. There were people that were in the right place at the right time and mined steem back when you could still mine. When steemit was launched back in July they already had a lot of steem power. Being in the right place at the right time does not mean a person may not be a jerk and feel a need to decide what other people should or should not have the right to see. This is very real. However, it is not due exclusively to them having this power at the beginning. The platform could support anyone with a lot of money instantly buying steem and powering themselves up to be at equivalent power. So WHEN (it will happen) steem truly explodes and a lot of people join we could end up with more powerful people overnight if they are willing to spend the money. Having a lot of money or power doesn't mean a person may not be intolerant, biased, and feel the need to oppress topics and/or people they don't like. This is human nature. It has been a problem throughout history.

The only positive to instant super powerful accounts being created is that this will drive the value of steem up a lot, and those of us that have steem will see the value of our accounts increase by quite a bit.

There has been a lot of debating and discussing on how to handle this. Technically the down vote IS the opposite of an up vote and you would think the impact of each would be equivalent. In a purely rational/logical sense this is true. By observation over many months I have concluded that for most people the down vote has a much larger psychological impact here on steemit than an up vote. This appears to be tied to the monetary aspect of the site being a force multiplier on the psyche.

The initial design of steemit was clearly modeled after reddit, and you can even see that in the name steemit. Reddit can become like trench warfare with it's down vote wars. It can be pretty hostile. Some people love it. Others hate it and avoid reddit primarily for that reason. It'd be nice not to have brought the same potential baggage to this design. This is amplified by the presence of money. People are more ecstatic when they get an up vote that rewards them well, and on the flip side when it takes rewards away they feel down trodden. Observation has shown me that on a purely psychological level the negative seems to have a larger weight. It can lead to depression, anger, etc. It can lead people to leave steemit, and if they have a following that can lead to negative PR against steemit.

This problem exists. It is a tricky one to navigate. Part of being decentralized and censorship free is that you cannot create a controlling group to monitor and police this. Such groups eventually can become biased themselves, they also CENTRALIZE operations and give a point of attack if someone wanted to take down or control the blockchain. This means some of the obvious things people have tried in other locations cannot be applied here if we wish to remain decentralized, and if our goal is to be censorship free at the blockchain level.

I do have some things I can tell you that might help. Besides the fact that there are simply always going to be jerks in the world, there are also some perceptual things that are colliding here.

There are really two things that have combined on steem. We have a market that has also combined with a boardroom/shareholder type environment. The problem is that markets and boardrooms treat votes very different from each other, but we've kind of combined them.

If you view steemit.com as a market for ideas, creativity, dialog, etc as I initially did then you view it much like walking into a store. When you walk into a store you BUY the things you are interested in, and you IGNORE the things you are not. You don't walk into a store with a black sharpy and start drawing big black negative check marks on the things you don't like. This is not how a market works. Instead you buy the things you are interested in, and people who like other things buy those. You don't get to decide "I hate caviar so no one should get paid for it". You don't need to. You simply let the market manage those things. Supply and Demand. It is not Supply, Demand, and Dislike. Dislike is not really a factor in a market. The factor really is how many people LIKE it (Demand) and thus will pay for it.

A boardroom on the other hand you call for votes on motions, ideas, etc and it is a YES or NO type of situation. Down votes make sense in this regard. Your steem power can be viewed as shares in a company. That is essentially what it is. It is Proof of Stake.

The interesting without historical precedent situation we are in is that we are actually using a hybrid. It is both of those things slammed together. This means we have a new set of never seen problems, that WE need to work together as a community to solve. They cannot magically solve themselves, and there is no red EASY button to press. In addition, people will suggest fixes based upon other historical situations that actually don't apply here. Some fixes may seem to address this problem while creating others.

Even with this voting issue steemit and steem are still one of the greatest things out there.

So what can you do? The only thing you can do is try to convince a person through reason not to be a jerk. Obviously calling them a jerk, and ranting at them is not going to work. In fact, it may simply get them to flag all of your posts. So the best course of action may be to be civil and plead your case on a purely rational sense. There are some people this may have no impact on. There are other cases it may work. The up side is if you DO succeed then perhaps how that person votes in the future may change.

We all can vote however we like. That is not going to change without centralizing and giving control to something/someone. We actually want people to vote how they want, I simply believe most people are viewing it as a market and the way the down vote works is very ALIEN in a market environment.

Realizing it is a hybrid might mentally shield you from some of the psychological impact of a down vote.

I have always been an advocate and defender in my life for the underdog, the bullied, etc. I have been anti-bully and would get right in their face. I personally have not been target flagged by anyone very powerful. I have had dialogs between myself and one of the more powerful people that would sometimes do this. I tried to keep it civil and when he resorted to name calling and belittling I did not. I did not take that bait. He did not flag me. I know he realizes I care about the community and I did treat him with civility even though we strongly disagreed on some points. Other people have bumped heads with him and become on his auto-flag bot so everything they post was flagged by him. I avoided that. SO FAR. Perhaps you can too, and that is why I shared how I approached it.

I challenged him and others not over me being flagged, but simply one of my TRIGGERS that I feel the need to stand up to those I perceive as bullies. When a person reduces potential earnings of someone for purely subjective reasons (i.e. other than plagiarism, spam, abuse) it can come across much like being bullied. This is an aspect of viewing it as a market rather than a boardroom. What we must remember is it is BOTH. It is truly something new, which means it has a new set of never before solved problems.

We can get angry and storm off and yell about it, or we can try to be part of the solution. We can work with the community and eventually we are sure to come up with solutions to these never before encountered problems.

Steem and Steemit are great. This is one of the big blemishes that EVERYONE eventually will get a glimpse of. It is the elephant that is there, but you don't notice it until it happens to step on you, or someone near you. Your face turns pale as you see it's massive bulk crush something. Fight or Flight then kicks in. Resisting the Fight or Flight mechanism is what we need to attempt to do.