A downside to having an immutable blockchain is one tends to underestimate the stupidity of people.
Some people decide they hate a project and instead of just finding a project they like and moving on they feel the need to attack and try to ruin it
These spam posts seem hostile, like a play to fill up the blocks with junk, and I would be surprised if they not automated.
Just putting it out there that if you want to have a long term social project that people enjoy, there have to be some limits on who can post and how often.
Maybe it shouldn't be free?
Don't know. Something to discuss.
I have noticed this rather pervasive problem getting worse, over the past month or so. And I fear it's not likely to go away.
"Freedom" is all good and fine, but what do end users WANT? I remember being on the forefront of this many years ago with Google. Google had to address the fact that having no controls meant they were unable to provide a positive search experience for users. You'd search for, let's say, "growing oranges" and people out there had found ways to spam search results to such a degree that none of the first 30-50 results would actually return information on "growing oranges." Instead, you'd end up on these endless "aggregator sites" where there's be 300 links to web sites that were all AD's for growing oranges, but no actual information about oranges.
Again, freedom is all good and fine, but it invariably means you end up with "bad" users supplanting "good," unless you're willing to take away the "bad" users' freedoms. Which suggests determining the objectives of the spammers, and then making those objectives either very costly or impossible to reach.
Of course, that doesn't rule out plain stupidity, vengeance motives and mental illness (trolls).
No easy answers, sadly.
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Yeah, I agree... unless there is some sort of management and community standards I fear it will be unusable for regular folks to get noticed and be curated.
I will say some of the curation efforts are better over here though
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Mixed feelings. Adding a small fee would almost certainly help with the spam problem, but it also might limit adoption. People expect social media to be free. (OTOH, getting a handle on spam might even help with adoption, so...)
The problem might be solvable by increasing the resource credits that are needed for posting, or maybe just add filtering to condenser so we can customize our views by ignoring posts from low-reputation authors, low numbers of words, or any other criteria that people might come up with. Another option might be some sort of "freemium" fee, where your first (insert arbitrary number) posts are free, and they become increasingly more expensive after that.
Every time these subjects come up, I always fall back to the position that it needs to be studied by professional economists and/or game-theorists and done carefully. We have a history of "shooting from the hip" and then reversing course a year later.
I guess my position would be: (i) Add filtering capabilities to condenser; (ii) Use the SPS to fund a game-theory/economics study to model it and make a proposal for optimizing blockchain economics (assuming there is community support for it); (iii) use the SPS to let the community vote to approve (or reject) the proposal; (iv) If approved, implement - use the SPS to fund development.
Edited to add: The first two users I checked are both using delegations from Steemit for their posting. Maybe we just need an efficient way to communicate abusive accounts to Steemit so they can quickly remove the delegations.
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I love the solution you suggested as for communicating bad accounts,
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I agree. Right now, someone is basically using Steemit's own stake to attack the blockchain (I checked 6 more accounts, and they all had 15SP delegations, too). This should be prevented. As I thought about it some more, even that is not as easy as it sounds, though. They'd still have to either (i) automate the delegation removal, which would - in turn - be abused; or (ii) manually verify every report, which could become overwhelming.
The best option might be for the community to actually make use of the downvote mechanism, and then steemit could automatically remove the delegation for any user whose reputation drops below some level. (I might even remember reading that they already have this automation in place, but I'm not sure.)
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yep, that is perfect. Once Rep hits... X remove it. @steemit
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Maybe they could even encourage people to participate with a "bounty", of sorts. If your downvote triggers a delegation removal, then you'll get an equivalent delegation for a period of N days.
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Calling @steemflagrewards!
Calling all cars!
Irony police to the front!
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