I just read a post by @ats-david. It is called Ostracism on Steemit: Why or Why Not?.
Overall if a person is unwilling to change and they do continue negative behaviors that impact steem members in the form of scams, exploits, etc that undermine the currency, drain the pool, and defraud people then I believe ostracism is something that could be done.
However, there is a problem here. As @ats-david noted this can be very effective on low power, low reputation accounts. I do not believe it can be particularly effective against the accounts of anyone that has been using the platform very long and has put some thought into it.
So let's say there is a powerful bad actor and we ostracize them. If I were that bad actor here is what I would do.
- Power down my account.
- Move my crypto to an exchange
- Move it from there to a different exchange
- Create one or more new steem accounts
- Purchase steem with the crypto on the exchange and power them up
- Post some simple posts I know are guaranteed up votes for awhile to get my reputation up there
- Resume my bad habit with one or all of those accounts
- Keep benefiting from scamming and repeat the steps above as necessary
The thing about reputation is it is a construct for the steemit website and not so much the blockchain itself, or other sites that may view the blockchain. It also increases any time someone with a higher reputation than you up votes you. So it can be fairly easy to raise your reputation at least into the 60s in a short amount of time. The higher you get the slower it becomes as there are fewer and fewer people with a higher reputation than you.
So while I like the idea of ostracizing if that is all we can do, but on the biggest offenders I do not think it will have any effect whatsoever. This is also why I am against setting thresholds where people above a certain power cannot vote (e.g. the whale no voting experiment) as all they need do is power down, create multiple accounts, redistribute their power, and continue voting as though that threshold did not exist.
This is a challenging problem. I don't know of any solution at this time. The best course of action I can think is for people to do very public investigations where they post all of their evidence including where it is routed, what other accounts it involves, etc. When powerful people are the target they don't like this, but I do believe information may be the best way to fight these problems. It won't solve or stop them, but I don't know how to solve or stop them at this time.
At least not if we wish to remain decentralized and not have some controlling body.
I'll give you an example. More we fight drugs, more drug related problems we have. Replace word drugs with: terrorism, immigration, obesity, family violence. You pick the word.
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Yep. We cannot fight FREEDOM with force. We must fight using reason and information. You cannot force a person not to do something and expect them to mentally agree it was the right thing. We can only provide information and hopefully persuade people through the use of reason.
I guess I shouldn't say ONLY. There are certain things we can get an expected reaction. We can talk in certain ways about trigger subjects like race, religion, climate change, vaccines, etc and get hostile divide and conquer type reactions from most of the population, but that is not really what either you or I are referring to I think.
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Avoiding ostracism is even easier than you suggest. On forums like reddit, spammers, trolls, and shills routinely purchase high-reputation accounts, then use that reputation to further their agenda. Those accounts are frequently banned or downvoted into oblivion, but the cost of jumping to another account is often trivial compared to the amount of damage done.
I don't have a silver bullet for such a problem (and neither does reddit,) but it's worth knowing about as we build a community here.
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We've had some very good investigative posts in the past. Even @ats-david has such a post. I believe those are the way to go.
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I have been following the current controversy a bit...
What do we DO here? What is the Steemit social content platform about?
Well, it's a place for content creation... and then the community serves as "peer curators."
What is "Curation?" Let's think about it, absent Steemit for moment. It's basically a process finding, organizing and highlighting worthy content. My wife and I have an art gallery. We curate the content of our gallery... we seek out of feature excellence, help the "nearly there" on their way, encourage the pretty hopeless to practice and send the shyster and hucksters on their way.
As a community, those of us who care about that community are-- by extension-- tasked with the well-being and continued health and growth of the community. It's no different from a local town... if hooligans move in and start spraying graffiti steps are taken to keep them from doing so. Scammers are just another color of vandal.
From where I am sitting, I agree there may be "logistics issues" in dealing with these situations on Steemit and the blockchain... BUT... water chooses the path of least resistance, no matter where it is.
Even if someone determined can do all the things you say... you have to ask yourself WHY they would persist in investing lots of time, money and resources in getting into a community that is determined to make it an eternal uphill (and costly!) battle for them... especially when there are lots of options out there where people only give a very minor $hit.
But there are no easy answers....
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Some people that have been involved in collusive voting have made thousands of dollars off of the process until an investigator catches them and calls them out on it. These are the powerful people I believe @ats-david was referring to in his post.
They have such big accounts that even if they only get away with it for a short period it is very lucrative to them.
So that is why my process is worth doing for them. If they can kind of play a shell game with their accounts they can make a tremendous amount of money.
Of course the only way I know to fight this is to write very public investigative blog posts when such things are discovered.
The more we know, the better we can "curate" and respond to the issues.
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That's where it gets really tricky... if the scammer's motivation is to profit from the surrounding infrastructure rather than from running the actual scam it can become super hard monitor and effectively do much about.
Reminds me of days of old (back when we wrote and it was printed on paper!) when I wrote for the "Income Opportunity" press... some of the most successful "dodgy programs" really weren't all that dodgy... but the founders' independent printing company that created all the sales brochures and literature was making millions while the programs themselves were under investigation for being a scam.
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Yep... It is really challenging, but what you described is basically the same type of thing that does appear to happen to some degree here.
The platform is still excellent, we just have some leeches.
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keeping a clean Steemit/chainBB/Busy community is just like keeping a rule of law society; it requires effort on the part of every member
In the end, what the community is the result of the efforts of the members of the community; people that don't ostracize scammers and spammers on their own, and instead rely on the efforts of whales, should not expect a community free of scammers.
all free men fight, all fighting men are free is a good simile
And while there are free riders in either the Steemit or the republican society, it does require responsible participation by the majority to protect either institution
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Correct. This is why I support investigative approach to it. We can ostracize, but if the person is hiding behind multiple accounts that can be difficult to spot unless people post some good investigative information.
It is not perfect, but it's what we have at the moment.
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Dude... I need help!!! I read your article about Bittrex and opened an account. Now I need to convert some SBD to cash and I can't even figure out how Bittrex works!!!!!
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I'll make a post... if I am going to do screenshots and such I might as well make a quick tutorial on it.
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Thanks... I'm broke as hell and need some bucks!!!
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Post is up... it should hopefully answer all of your questions. If not, it should at least be enough to get you started.
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Also note the method of withdrawing to charge up the visa card... if you are making purchases from places that accept payment in bitcoin you can simply send bitcoin to them the same way you do that card.
The bitpay card requires $9.99 worth of bitcoin to get it and then it takes a little bit for it to arrive. So if you need the money before you can get the card you may be able to google something like steemit paypal tutorial or something like that. I believe there were people that wrote something like that months ago using Kraken. I haven't tried any of that so I can't be much help that way.
I use my bitpay credit card several times a week and it works great.
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This is quite a tricky situation and I'm not even quite sure how to solve it myself either. It would seem that awareness of the situation wouldn't be enough in certain cases, but perhaps it might in most? Maybe allowing for the community to have a source of information where we could check daily about accounts which have been deemed worthy of "ostracization" would be of some benefit?
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It's an ongoing experiment. This steemit experience is a new an unprecedented collision of a lot of different ideas. As such we'll likely be seeking solutions to things that have not quite existed before. We can do it, but there will likely be some painful moments to work through.
By the way, welcome back. I haven't seen you post in awhile.
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This is quite true. I've enjoyed being a part of such an innovative experience.
Thank you, school is beginning to slow down so I've got a little more time to write again. The updates are nice!
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I was all for castration but they thought it better to ostracize.
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Do you have a link to the post he is referring to? I missed it.
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The author account is "matttrainer" it was overt scam with whale support.
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You know the old saying: 'There's a whale fooled everyday!"
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Or several that refuse to answer simple questions and reasonable validity concerns. Or acknowledge the preceding reputation of said individual and previous scams.
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In Latin they say Qui Prodest? Who benefits, or who profits. People usually support the things that benefit them personally (except crazy guys like me that still believe in archaic principles such as honor and integrity!)
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wow I made a reply too. lol
https://steemit.com/reply/@skeptic/a-reply-to-ostracism-on-steemit-why-or-why-not-by-ats-david
add a link to your in the comments?
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