This is the post in which I tell you that Jerry Banfield was right about something.
Sorry, I should have warned you that was coming. Sit down, take a few deep breaths. Can I bring you some tea? I can't? You can't send tea over the internet? I would buy into that ICO, let me tell you.
Anyway, a few days ago Jerry made this post about how flags are bad, bad, bad, and don't worry, he's not right about that part. The main thrust of his post is self-serving and deceptive as always. But he did say something that caught my attention a little bit:
Don't like someone's skin color? Downvote them! Dislike someone's religion? Kill off their account with downvotes. Hate a certain sexual orientation? Silence their voice with a downvote long enough and they will leave.
This tied in with something @markgritter said when I was first getting into Steem and talking to him about it:
I think that's definitely a legitimate criticism and one we need to consider. So far 4chan and the like haven't decided we're important enough to mess with, and the biggest problem we have is Jerry himself. Maybe some things like Dan flagging posts critical of EOS.
What we haven't seen is an organized campaign to shut down any woman who has any power, any voice of her own, the way we've seen them on Twitter. We haven't seen a war against the SteemJet folks by white supremacists who don't want to see them organized and effective.
If we're looking for mass adoption, we're going to see those things. 4chan and the like have the users, they have the resources, they have the bot-making ability to completely shut down the effectiveness of legitimate Steem users.
And not only do I not see any evidence that we're prepared for that, if we're trying to prepare for that it's not anywhere I can see. We're spending our time developing complex systems to limit the rewards from self-voting, while at the same time making it easier to sign up in the first place. We might as well be painting a target on ourselves.
This is what worries me about the future of Steem. We like to talk about a day when Steem is a large-scale player in social media, but to get there we're going to have to face down the existing large players. And while that includes economic powerhouses like Facebook, it also includes decentralized associations of colossal assholes.
What do we do to not get eaten by them?
Half the time I think downvotes should be removed altogether and replaced by a user level filter.
I've been thinking about this kind of thing a bit lately. The proof of brain concept is a good one, but too one-dimensional I think. Ray Dalio is pretty famous for weighting people's opinions based on his perception of their expertise in the subject.
I would love to see a system that integrates something like linkedin endorsements where your vote only matters in the subject area that the community agrees that you know what the hell you're talking about. For example, I know a lot about stocks, investments, and taxes but I know fuck all about music. So my upvote or downvote in a musical context shouldn't carry much weight.
SMTs could theoretically achieve this if/when they are developed (I hope).
edit: self-vote for the lulz
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Have you seen @t3ran13? It's kind of an automated way of doing that.
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Nope, that's brand new to me
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I think in the short term, say if this happened tomorrow, in order for it to not immediately do a lot of damage a whale would need to get involved. There are enough people here that a whale could delegate and make an anti-terrorism force if they really wanted.
This is something I've thought about before and I was surprised it hadn't happened yet. I'm thinking maybe greed trumps hate for the most part. Also cartoon racists and bigots tend to not be the brightest lot and Steemit in it's current state is a bit complex.
Anyway I think it's the right move to focus on the problems that are problems immediately, then move on to next level problems. We don't need to solve the problem of overpopulation on Mars right now :)
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Hadn't even thought of that. We could be in some serious trouble.
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Hadn't even thought
Of that. We could be in some
Serious trouble.
- themanwithnoname
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
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You incorrectly detected haiku. It wasn't. It was just a comment that I made.
I would like to unsubscribe from your service. Please stop following me.
#unsubscribe
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How about adding a reputation merit to downvotes? Instead of basing the entire downvote on your stake, which could be acquired using money and put on accounts that never post, becoming basically untouchable? Of course this is another double edged sword, because with enough money you can buy a high enough reputation using bots but that would probably discourage the creation of thousands of accounts just to downvote because their efforts would be meaningless.
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Rep is also very easy to game (look at mine) but there are some interesting interaction-based rep algorithms floating around out there and we could use one of them.
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This is basically the failure of democracy. The reason that republics are stable and successful are that ideally they have safeguards built in to protect the minority view... due process, the presumption of innocence, and all that old fashioned stuff.
Yes, republics fail to protect the minority at times, but this usually is a failure of the people within the institutions.
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There's also a flaw where a republic was designed to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, because that was their threat model, but they didn't think to protect the majority from the tyranny of a hyper-aggressive minority, because griefers basically hadn't been invented yet. (Apart from Aaron Burr.)
The one nice thing about this problem is we have the advantage of watching other people deal with it first. Notably Reddit, which seems to be working through a lot of the "but freedom!" issues that we're likely to have here. Maybe we can learn from them.
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I looked at the comments that were available, one thing no one has mentioned is that currently down votes only really work downward. Someone with a higher SP/Rep. All things being equal except for lets say Reputation. Someone with a reputation of 80 and 100,000SP can downvote and damage any one with the same 100,000SP and less Reputation. The 70REP person with 100,000SP can not have any effect on the 80REP person, other than removing rewards.
As far as penalizing serial downvoters (@berniesanders certainly qualified as one while down voting one person haejin), that would be a mistake.
I know downvotes are a touchy issue right now, but why? Could it be some of those that ignored the B & H trainwreck are now worried and are doing anything they can to convince people the down vote has to go? Just food for thought.
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People are downvoting Jerry, and like it or not Jerry leads a lot of the discussion around here. Mostly from people talking about how wrong he is.
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Vindictive down votes will result in steemit looking like FB, just a different source of censorship. I would like to see more risk to chronic down voters. If it hurts the down voter a little too, we could still down vote if it was important. But If someone down votes a LOT, especially if it is against the same person; it should hurt them too!
I recently saw where two whales were involved in a down vote war. They could have helped a lot of minnows, with half the energy expenditures; and not looked like petulant children. Not good for steemit!
>:(Maybe we need a witness arbiter....
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I'm thinking it might be worthwhile to do something like build a downvote bank based on the lifetime value of your upvotes. So the people who have a significant upvoting history would have more policing power, which would both give an edge to the pre-existing community members over any hostile invaders and prevent habitual downvoting.
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That's a really good idea! You should be in charge around here. I'd vote to give you the keys. Ha ha.
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I'd vote for him too!
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Something needs to be done!
It worries me, as a "nothing" on Steemit; to see people with good numbers, fighting each other; instead of promoting the platform, or lending their knowledge to minnows!
>:(Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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Watched pot? Stopped clock?
Hmm I always assumed that some of them are already here, but yeah when it gets easy to get an account I wonder what will happen... I'm not even sure it's possible. In theory they will be at a disadvantage due to stake weighting, unless they also happen to have a lot of money too. Then yeah. Uh oh....
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We like to think of whales as being economically large, but by the standard of the rest of the world nobody here has a lot of money. 4chan could eat us wholesale, it's just a matter of whether they thought it was worth it. And they're nothing next to more political organizations.
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It worries me more what current whales and stakeholders can do, than that of external user communities.
I don't believe such communities would have the motivation or money to adquiere the stake needed to lay the wreckage you describe on this post.
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I don't see a problem, if someone really wanted to hurt post rewards, they'd need to buy steem which pumps up the price. If you want to troll here, you have to invest. Making bots is easy but it still requires account creation fees and starting delegations.
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What good is a higher price if you can't interact?
Both of those are going away in hf20. We're getting some kind of token-based free account creation.
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If someone wanted to downvote like $3 they'd need to buy like $10000 steem, so no matter what, they can't make that huge of a difference to interaction but will make a slightly noticeable difference to the price.
I'll have to look at the spec for hf20 because I haven't been keeping up recently
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If that wasn’t so long, it would be a great name for a band.
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DACA
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You got a 33.60% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @tcpolymath!
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Hi @tcpolymath,
To ask a completely unrelated question... how do you get whitelisted on Operation Curation Bot? From the website there doesn't seem to be anyway to contact the administrator. There also doesn't seem to be a discord channel related to it. I assume that whitelisting on @ocdb simply means a human checks that I'm a well-behaved citizen of Steemit.
Thanks,
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I have no idea. One of the other users DMed me last week that I had been whitelisted, but I don't even know how to see the list.
It has some pretty weird behaviors at the moment, so I can see why they're not ready to release it to everybody.
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how to be whitelisted? is there a discord, please help me :) @tcpolymath.
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I have zero interaction with the ocdb people.
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