How many of you here publish content on traditional social media?
Videos on Youtube and Blog posts on Medium are popular for content creators because they bring traffic. In effect, they are both search engines from which it is easier rank higher in search that via Google alone.
When you put content out there, you put it out to be viewed, if you are lucky it might get viewed by more than a couple of people. The more people that read it, the harder it becomes to keep everyone happy. That means some people will like it and some people won’t. Some people will be vocal with their support and some people will be vocal with their complaints.
Its easy here on steem to show support. We just push a little vote button and bang a few rewards on a post. Often people will leave comments too and engagement takes place.
We also have the option to flag, but unlike other platforms, flagging removes rewards from the author or creator.
With HF21 only around the corner, soon we will all have flags to use that won’t affect our voting power. I’m wondering to myself; how many people will now start to flag because it wont waste their VP? Will we see a change in behaviour with steem users?
I read 2 posts by @aggroed, which with a bit of humour really breaks a tense situation down. If you missed these posts do check them out
https://steemit.com/flagging/@aggroed/hf21-training-please-flag-this-post
https://steemit.com/hf21/@aggroed/hf21-training-go-flag-someone-else
There was also a post by @whatsup talking about the situation on Whaleshares where they have removed downvotes. Rather the opposite of what steem is about to do. You can check out that post here:
https://steemit.com/busy/@whatsup/what-happens-if-you-remove-downvotes
I post content on Youtube. Not as often as I should as part of my content strategy, but that’s beside the point here. With posting content comes the possibility someone won't like it and so the thumbs down come in. Not ever often I must say, but it happens. And it does not bother me at all. If I was getting a lot, I would be taking a hard look at my content, because most often, it is a reflection on how people feel after viewing the video.
I'm not so bothered about being flagged here on steem either. Its an odd platform where often being flagged helps you grow. Flags have been used for personal vendetta and anyone in the way would get caught in the crossfire. Get hit with some of these and the other side and their friends often come to the rescue. When I see someone get flagged, the question I ask them is what did you do? because its never really about the content.
Ok so flags are also used to protect the rewards pool, and on occasion, I have engaged in flagging for this very reason. I feel I have used mine ethically. Others might disagree.
But, now that I am trying to establish a business here on steem, protecting the rewards pool is not my priority and I am not so sure my mindset will change just because I have some free flags.
With my brand, getting a flag because someone expected more from my content and were a little let down that I didn’t solve their problem is one thing. I don’t expect everyone to be happy, but who wants to be dragged into platform politics when you are running a business. Especially when it can filter down to my users. Its not the blockchain I want to run.
I do think flags will be used more after the HF. I would be happy enough to flag spam comments on my posts, but they won’t have any rewards either. But I would be happy to do that now too. However, I think the bigger problem is, as long as you are removing reward (aka money) from someone, it gets personal and so we will see many tit for tat flag war about to set in.
I've been thinking about this from a mechanical point of view lately, and I keep circling back to the same ideas:
Steemit is built around the assumption that financial renumeration and opinion should and must be conflated. Part of the reason we see so many problems around voting is rooted in that essential truth.
The problem isn't so much with upvotes, though necessarily bundling "I like this thing" and "I think you should be rewarded for this thing" leads to bad outcomes inherently. Because we have a limited amount of VP as consumers, the signaling is confusing. Do you hold off on voting for something that you really like until you have enough VP to reward it, percentagewise, as much as you like it or do you accept that you will probably forget about it by then and give it what little vote you can give because the emotional feedback of the vote is also part of its value? But then, voting is also a bet on what other people who find the article later are going to like and has nothing to do with what you like, in that context. Upvotes are broken and awkward for signaling purposes, and part of that is because they conflate this mechanical financial reward system in a gameable way with simply signaling what stuff you like.
But flags are worse, because they almost never just indicate what you don't like. While signaling that you do like things really doesn't help you get more of the things you like except by providing tiny rewards to the creator, flagging just exists to take money out of people's pockets. And it's explicitly stated as such; you are admonished to flag content that you believe is being "rewarded too much" from the pool – even if you like that content. While upvotes are really a bet to see if you can get ahead of the motion of the crowd (and the more homogenous that crowd is, the better it easier it is for you to make a bet along those lines), flags only exist to manipulate the reward pool in a negative way for the target. There is no useful loop. Mechanically, it does nothing to keep you from seeing content like that except for stripping whatever rewards it might have seen. Because the reasons for doing so are near infinite (from "because it's spam" to "that guy flagged me once"), the signal is useless.
Unless your only interest is directly manipulating the rewards pool, and the only people who can do that with any real success are already whales because the rest of us are too busy just trying to find things that we like and consuming things that we like to be overly bothered with hunting down things that we don't like.
More flags for free? The people who go hunting the platform for things they don't like or people they don't like or ideas they don't like get a special boost and the rest of us who actually curate (in the real sense, not in the sense of the Steem blockchain) the content that we see trying to maximize how much of it we like get almost no benefit at all. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say we get absolutely no benefit at all.
I would rather have more free upvotes, which also manipulate the rewards pool in a direct way, then more free downvotes, because upvotes at least have the chance of encouraging people who create content I want to do more of it just for the emotional validation and gratification of more upvotes than I would more free downvotes which do nothing to give me more of what I want but only directly affect me getting less of what I don't want while simultaneously not promoting the growth of anything that helps me out.
(The obvious counter argument is to say that flags reduce the amount of reward spammers and bot users get, which increases the tide for all boats – and that is technically true, but it increases the tide for all boats, including the spam and bullshit content that I am simply not interested in ever seeing and haven't seen and won't see. More upvotes mean that the things I like and topics I follow get rewarded from growing part of the pool, more downvotes mean that the occasional thing that I see that don't like throws those rewards back into the pool to go to other things that I don't like. This is just bad thinking and bad design from the ground up, and now they want to give us more downvotes.)
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Free upvotes to counter the troll flaggers will be next
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At which point we are right back to square one with exactly the same amount of SP being able to be leveraged – except for the fact that more of it will be able to be deployed by bots.
Which might be the whole plan from the beginning, but I suspect that's giving way too many people way too much credit.
I suspect that Whaleshares has accidentally struck on a better strategy by removing downvotes entirely because it just doesn't provide a useful enough signal to either the financial side of the blockchain or the social network platform which doesn't care that you have particular tastes or interests. If it's not useful, don't bother having the overhead of carrying it.
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I think the flagging bullies will have a more reason to flag innocent people bc it won't take their VP. Times like this I wish I had a lot of VP and a strong enough vote to weigh it out.
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I think you are probably right, lol maybe we need free votes to counter the bully flaggers
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I was thinking the same thing. or upvote like crazy to get my SP up
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Unfortunately it is a lot of larger accounts that deserve the most flagging with the voting circles and bitbots. I don't think all the other mammals in the sea will be wanting to get into a flag war with accounts that could flag them into oblivion. We'll see .
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I agree, most small fish wont get into flagging
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I have never been against flags as long as the person doing so provides a way we can improve based on his/her expectations. If just trolling, then it becomes bothersome although taking the high road will often be my path.
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The problem is, a lot of it is trolling and just personal bullshit
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I doubt I will use down voted much. I would rather spend my time supporting the good then "punishing" the bad.
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An approach many will take
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I think you're right and we are going to see some "tit for tag" flag wars as you put it. I fear they could become quite nasty and vindictive to the overall detriment of the platform and I blogged about that recently.
I am glad to see you still here and not afraid to call things how you see them. I hope you don't cop any flags yourself but it sounds like you're fully prepared to wear them. With pride perhaps :)
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I'm sure some of them will become nasty but that means some people will have to power up more, that will be good for the price 🤣
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Assuming the flag war loser (and their followers) doesn't become disillusioned, power down and leave?
I hope you are right, but I've never seen a nasty flag war that was a good look for the platform when we are trying to attract new people.
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Sorry to hear that @paulag. But we know what is good and what is wrong keep going what are the good things and share it with us.
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I rarely used flags before HF21 and when I did, I didn't care if they used my VP. I doubt I'll be changing my approach on them afterward.
I was pretty neutral about the free flags until I saw people start to hype their use even going to the point of saying that if you don't flag you don't care about Steem. What a load of crap. Like we need to see more flag wars landing on innocent users because a some large stakeholders can't just pull them out and measure them like civilized aholes.
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Perfect answer to the use of flags.
AND, as mentioned above, no red fish, or minnow will dare.
and we'll never see one whale, or top 20 witness flag another
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Agreed, that is a loads of crap
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I think delegation to use flags would be a much better deal for every part.
Like having a moderator in each tag that can review and police those actions. Otherwise retaliation will always happen, if a single user downvote or flag other content/account.
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I would delegate my free flags, will that be possible?
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I don’t know but you can count me in as well if that become a possibility.
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I think we need flagging to become more accepted on Steem. It is mainly to adjust rewards, but if you see content you really do not like then it is an option there too. The rewards you see on a new post are just potentially earned and are subject to change.
There are plenty of really undeserving posts out there with substantial rewards that are either bought or via some 'circle jerk'. We should at least deal with those. Most of my flags go to @crystalliu who is milking Steem rewards with paid votes on junk posts.
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I agree that the payouts are subject to change and yes the flags are to adjust rewards. And that's why people dont accept them, because it effects their potential earnings and money is personal.
.
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People have made downvoting way too personal. In Youtube you're not going after someone who's disliking your videos, then why is it taken so personally on Steem? Right, because of money. But I think it's wrong to think that you're taking money from someone by downvoting, because it's not yours until it's in your wallet.
I've already started to take a bit of a different approach and flag if I'm seeing abuse even before HF 21 and will use them more after.
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It doesn't matter how true this is, people are still going to get upset about it and retaliate. Usually the most abusive people are the worst when confronted, probably because they know very well what they're doing isn't accepted as fair or right. It's like confronting someone who's causing damage to something. Most people don't, because they could get aggressive with them.
Now I've just reminded myself of something a friend was telling me today. She was walking past a house with her husband and someone let their dog out to go across to the park, take a crap, then called it back in. Her husband asked if he was going to pick up after his dog and got a mouthful of abuse. So he got his own poop bag out, picked the poop up and smeared it across this man's doorstep.
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Lol serves the man right
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It's all down to the money for sure
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Thank you so much for participating in the Partiko Delegation Plan Round 1! We really appreciate your support! As part of the delegation benefits, we just gave you a 3.00% upvote! Together, let’s change the world!
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I wasn't aware of the change to flagging, its not something I do much and the times I have I generally try to explain why in a civil way and I don't see me changing that with this change but I do feel you may be right this could well lead to flgagging wars which is not a good thing
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Hi @paulag!
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