I find it extremely hard to believe you hadn't thought about this kinda thing when Steemit was being developed.
A quick look shows everyone it's all about selling steem. You want to avoid being flagged, buy more steem. You get attacked, buy more steem and flag back.
Perhaps you shouldn't have sold so much steem yourself. I hear there is still some for sale though.
Seriously, do away with the damn flag system and put fourth a group of admins, paid admins; to deal with the garbage...
I did see this problem coming and when I suggested a proposed solution (vote negation) it was rejected by the very whale(s) who are acting out today. With vote negation it is possible to let the two disagreeing parties "stand down" and leave the voting to everyone else.
People were concerned that this would lead to "hard feelings" and a new kind of "abuse". I still stand by vote negation, but obviously it takes a vote war to get some people to see the problems I saw 6 months ago.
@dantheman Negation would be promise breaking for this platform. It's literally blocking a person from excerising the only promise made by this platform, i.e. you can buy and exercise influence.
A much simpler solution would be split out downvoting and flagging and make both require a comment explaining why.
If you did this there would be no problem here.
"I'm downvoting this because it is redundant, low quality and does not deserve the fraction of the limited reward pool it has earned. By downvoting this I am redistributing the pool to others."
That's all flaggin is in this case right? A redistribution of someone else's earnings to those who may be more deserving, needy or whatever but lower profile?
I mean seriously, would @ozchartart forgo payment for a day if he knew it would help @deviedev get her little sister out of jail?
https://steemit.com/life/@deviedev/jenny-jump-up-is-in-trouble
I know I would.
Point is, keep doing what you're doing but take a second to explain why, each time.
You can always go into the chamber and change the "N SQUARED" curve to not approach infinity so fast
to bring a little mortality to the current STEEM god population.
This would be the single thing that would drastically improve steemit.
Fair enough.
Now the problem is going to be even harder to deal with. You have accounts powering up that never intend to make a post or comment in an attempt to shield themselves. Everyday steemians have no defense against this and seeing it happen is a strong deterrent to investing .
Once content is here that "powers that be" want silenced it will be no problem at all to power up the largest whale ever known. Remember, the Clinton's have over 7000 youtube accounts backed by Soros money.
This ain't the BBS days of trolling Dan, these people are well paid and far beyond petty whale wars we see today..
Steem on..
I have also been making the case of the need to counterbalance voting power. There is some very sound game theory regrading the need for tit-for-tat reward/punishment.
Well, I feel confident you can find a solution. I am just not as confident it will be accepted by the community.
We're all in this together now, but some are way deeper than others :)
Thanks for your attention.
There could be a community service sort of thing, where users can vote on disputed flags for very small STEEM rewards. Once a certain amount of people have reviewed the decision and found a 75% favour in one way or another, then the damages(payout and rep deduction) could be applied--if the flag was agreed upon that is. If a flag is overturned, there could also be some sort of penalty, applied to the one who produced the flag-- for example, the weight of the flag is reversed and applied to them. This would discourage people from flagging for insignificant reasons.
There would be no way to abuse this because the whales could not use bots to manipulate the results.
There may have to be a lot more users before that could be implemented however.
Thats not a solution. The solution is what youre doing right now -- downvoting crap sockpuppet accounts when they make crap, overrewarded posts. IMO, its long overdue.
The system already provides a means to negate a vote that you disagree with. Casting a vote in the opposite direction.The vote negation thing, IMO, was a cop out. It was a way to downvote bad content without having to sign your name to a downvote.
It was also potentially hugely abusable. What happens when the guy you describe as prone to tantrums decides he doesnt like someone so he's going to take away their vote (which he can do, if theyre a non-ninja, with just a small sub account that he doesnt use anyway)
part of being a leader is coming to terms with the notion that sometimes, maybe even often, youre going to make a call that some people don't like. And youre going to get called a shithead.
This would completely undermine the whole concept of a decentralised blockchain as well as stakeholder governance. I would be completely out, as (I imagine) would many others who support Steem for the philosophical ideals it represents.
Yes, that would be a complete disaster.
Disagree.
Can you elaborate on that?
I'd rather not ;)
...but here it goes, I don't think that it would be a complete disaster.
Your comment didn't elaborate on how it would be a complete disaster, so I really have no basis for counter-argument.
I simply fail to see how it would be a disaster and, as you offered up nothing as an example of how/why it would be, I see no reason to build up a case, so to speak.
So what?
We're after the masses, not you and the few others whom share your ideals.
If we lose one for every 100 that we gain, it's a win.
You're in the wrong project if you think Steem is just about mass appeal. It is about reshaping the world.
You may wish that it is so, but I don't buy it.
Money is almost always the root motivator and I wouldn't bet against it here, regardless of what various people claim to be the true motivator.
Without decentralization there is no money. Might as well invest in liberty dollars.
[nested reply]
I don't care about ideals or definitions of "money" versus "currencies".
All I care about is keeping the wealth that I've accrued and these "liberty dollars" have done a fine job of holding their value long enough for me to do just that. Furthermore, I see no law of physics that states decentralization of X as a necessary mainstay. As, during every period of man, the best bet is to diversify investments, because there's no knowing what the collective greed of humanity and its systems will allow to transpire.
If, for example, all the world's governments were to decide to make investing in crypto-currencies illegal, then I, personally, wouldn't want to be one to challenge their authority - call me a coward, if you want, but I value my life outside of bars.
As an investor this doesn't sound bad to me.
Maybe not for the small few, certainly not good for the masses.
It's like being sued by Bill Gates, do you A. Run out and hire a good lawyer? or B settle ASAP ?
No one in their right mind wants to jump in a whale war from scratch, you wouldn't either if you had to buy steem @ $.015
It would lead to large demand and price increases for STEEM. Even as a small investor you would enormously benefit from the resulting price increases.
This is not entirely hypothetical; apparently similar things have happened in games where spending money gives you an advantage leading to an "arms race" and very large revenues for the game.
Socially it may not be the best thing for the site but as an investor (of any size) that kind of demand would be nothing short of wonderful.
...until it starts to effect (affect?) you directly.
Having a whale "follow-flag" (I love to coin terms) you, as a dolphin (or less) is analogous to a strongman competitor, or professional MMA fighter, bullying your average man, of average build/ fighting ability. True, these "victims" have the choice to train and/or hit the weight rooms to place themselves closer to par, but everyone and their mothers know that there's less than a snowball's chance in hell that equality (of competition) will ever be achieved, regardless of his/her motivations or efforts.
But we're missing something here on Steemit, which the "real-world" analogy has - the victim can call the police to handle the bullying. Follow-flag dolphin, on the other hand, is shit out of luck.
Apparently this precedent exists and has led to high demand in some MMOGs. So I simply do not rule out the possibility it could lead to high demand and large price increases here, and if so that is definitely something that investors would like. Remember investors are not necessarily posting on the site at all, so need not be combatants in the flag fight you describe. The role of investing is distinct from the role of social platform user (though of course there is overlap as well). I'm not claiming necessarily that it would happen.
Hmm.
Well, if most of the social platform users tag out from Steemit, due to these (hypothetical) malicious flaggings, then there's nothing to invest in other than what essentially amounts to "vaporware" (no real value).
I think it's clearly a key to keep the majority of the social user-base happy, no?
EDIT addition:
Also, I'm not convinced that what works in MMOGs will correspond one to one with what people will support when they have thousands of dollars at stake and real flesh to protect.
I'm not even claiming that it works in MMOGs (consistently at least). It was pointed out to me that it does happen in some cases, so I commented that if it did happen here it would be good for investors.
I'd also note that it is very speculative at this point what will build a user base that is significantly above zero (on the scale of successful online social platforms) as well as what would keep such a user base happy. This has not been demonstrated at all.
Competing with established platforms that are more specialized to the task of focusing strictly on user experience is not an easy task. Steem/it needs to focus on and somehow exploit its unique advantages. In a big way.