You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Flagging Bot Users Arbitrarily Is Like Arresting Those Paying Protection Money To The Mob
What @lexiconical and you say are not mutually exclusive things. Bid bots might well be "reward siphoning tools" as you say, they are also an effective promotion tool which is
- available - nothing has been done by Steemit Inc. to prevent them from existing, as I point out in other posts, see page 15 of the Steem whitepaper where it is written clearly that "eliminating abuse [...] shouldn't be the goal" (sic!)
- to everyone - everybody is free to use bots
If bots are available and everyone is free to use them then those who don't should contemplate changing a poorly designed system.
Also, regardless of the provocative style of the author, his arguments remain sound.
As long as bots are permitted, flagging the users is akin to punishing the victims of the Mob. With the current setup where "eliminating abuse [...] shouldn't be the goal", Steemit Inc. has created a "Mob-ocracy" and what you are doing is the modern equivalent of "turf wars" between mafia clans.
It's a real shame that the "promote" function is so useless, otherwise all this could be avoided. Right now you basically pay to get your posts thrown in the ghetto of the Promoted tab, which no one in their right mind would ever visit to begin with. I mean who the hell likes ads? That's as if Facebook had a news feed option that only shows ads lol who would use that ever?
is there a possibility of making two trending pages, one with an organic only trending, or a limited amount of bid bots used, and another trending page with no limits on the bot? That way it would give the reader some control on which trending page to personally support and read, upvote or share, and vice versa?
There are several ideas being floated around. One would be to simply not have a global trending page. You could still have trending "per tag". Another would be to have trending linked not to rewards but to views×votes (regardless of rewards). A third has been implemented, a bot (Steem Sincerity I think) that comments on posts with high rewards from bots and informs readers that the post "trends" artificially thanks to bots. A fourth is the SMT thingy that's in the process of being implemented where you have several currencies, one per community if I understood well.
You do realize that no action taken to prevent serious flaws is a platform killer. If everyone delegated all their SP to bots, that would be the death of manual curation and quality control. The blockchain would end up filled with worthless garbage. Guess what would happen to the price of STEEM and SBD in USD? The more SP you have, the more concerned you should be about what's going on the platform as a whole.
Decentralized platforms running without a central authority must rely on voluntary community policing and self-governance against abuse. Who gives a fuck what the current system specs allow or the whitepaper says? If the system does not work, it needs to be fixed.
Absolutely, that's why I keep leaning in in the debate :)
Absolutely. What I'm trying to say is that "no action taken to prevent serious flaws is a platfrom killer" DOES NOT IMPLY (logically speaking) "any action is better than no action". There are actions you can take that can be WORSE than "no action" (basically speeding up the death of the platform ...)
Yeah but let's face it, that is not entirely the case of Steemit. And frankly I think it's a good thing, too. If Steemit Inc proposes something sensible and a handful of big witnesses approve then it can be implemented. We are at HF 19 after all, not at HF 1 or 2 ...
Well, that is a very misguided position I can tell you. It's like the tail who says "who gives a s**t what the dog's head wants to do? I say I need to wag!"
On the contrary, the glue that keeps this place together and prevents it from descending into a destructive free-for-all (or most likely "all-against-all") is precisely the fact that this place has a mission (emanating from the whitepaper) and a history, a past from which to learn. These are the fixed points that should always be used as a guidance when looking for consensus not about "whether it needs fixing or not" (it does) but about the next question, which is FAR more difficult: "what is the right fix to apply?"