Let's make this a better Steemit for all.

We all have our opinions about Steemit and the way it works and looks.

And that is okay. Even though you can join for free, and it's still beta, that does not mean we do not see what can be done better.

The idea of this series is not to complain about Steemit, but to voice my experience and if possible solutions.

As a community we can make this thing grow, and become bigger than the other social networks.

While we all want to see Steemit as the free social network, where you can even make some money by voicing your opinions, the reality is that this is not true.

We are facing some issues that need to be addressed, which is inevitable for any new social network.
If we ignore these issues, Steemit will not be the success we all want it to be, and most likely will no longer exist in a few years.

What are the issues

• Self-upvoting

Some people find that whales are draining the rewards pool by self-upvoting.
- I have no problems with this, unless a whale only uses his voting power for his own good. As long as they also upvote other people's posts, I do not see a big problem here.

• Bots

Some bots do great work, like upvoting minnows or welcoming new users, others just comment on posts to get part of the rewards pool
- We will never get rid of bots, let's not to try that. Most add to Steem, others don't.

• Upvote/Resteem comments

Some upvote/resteem comments ask for payment to resteem, while they do not have the number of followers they claim, or those followers will never take a look at your post.
- The best way is to educate new users, so they will check before blindly accepting an offer.

• Spam/Scam/Plagiarism

Copy/Paste is always an issue and a cause of concern.
- There are already some bots checking for this. @cheetah and @steemcleaners are doing quite a good job.

• Indecent content

This is difficult, what one person considers indecent may be completely normal for another.
- Here we must be extemely careful not to impose one persons opinions upon everybody else.

• Misconduct

Shouting at people, or calling them names, are common on social networks. People feel anonymous and safe behind a keyboard.
- This is generally bad behavior and will drive new users away.

• Flag wars

With the downvote option we see people flagging others at every chance they have, making it very personal.
- This is generally bad behavior and will drive new users away.

Current approach

Currently there is no real approach to tackle these issues.
Steemit Inc, the mother company that builds Steemit, has taken a completely hands-off approach.

The only way you can object to a post now, is by downvoting it. This can immediately lead to retaliation, so many people won't even dare to go that route.

There are some initiatives where bots or (groups of) people have taken it upon themselves to monitor Steem and take action when they feel something is wrong, like plagiarism or spam. The problem is that when they decide something is spam and downvote a post, you have no way to object to this. Sometimes you can contact them via steemit.chat or discord, but that always requires extra effort from the user, and you always depend on the downvoting party if they agree it was done without proper cause.
This will of course never happen if they feel you've broken some of the rules that they have defined, even though others may not agree with those rules.

I'm calling on @ned and the rest of Steemit Inc to take more of a leader-role in this, because they are the only ones who can implement some of the changes I'm proposing.

These are the steps I feel that need to be taken;

There should be an automated tool that goes through the comments of an account and checks if these are automated or not.
This is not really difficult, you can check for speed after the post, recurring content and whether the account posts anything itself of not.
If this account is considered to be an abusive bot, downvote every comment they have made.
Accounts of this kind can be easily stopped from posting in the future.

Secondly make sure a downvote or flag CANNOT be administered unless you also give a comment why you're downvoting. If someone takes offense or has another reason to downvote, let them explain why.

This is all still very simple and can be done using a quite simple piece of software.

But here's the only way we can take control of the situation.

We need people (Steemigators?) to check whether a downvote or flag is justified.

There must always be an impartial party that will look at flagged content and decides if the downvote was correct or not.
It is not necessary to go through all the downvoted content, but only when asked by a user.

To accomplish this we need a button!!!

Yep, a real button next to each post.

When you press the button you can choose to inform the Steemigators that you don't agree with a post, a comment or a downvote.
They will then check the post/commment/vote and decide whether it was correct or not.
At that point the Steemigator must have enough power to counteract any downvote or upvote already issued.

This not only makes it a tool to object to downvotes, but also to ask for a reaction from Steemit for content users consider not Steemit-worthy.

This means we need to have rules what we will and will not allow. As far as I'm concerned, the rules laid-out in the whitepaper are fine. Things we would consider downvotable would be child-pornography or abuse, terrorist and extremist images/posts and other posts which everyone can agree upon to be beyond what we want on Steemit.

This is something we need Steemit Inc to take the lead in. They need to build the solution to do this, but they also have the responsibility to make sure all users get a fair treatment.
We can select some Steemit users to be Steemigators, they could make some extra SBD or SP doing this.

I will urge everyone not get carried away, we want this to remain the place you can express your opinions, and let's not become Fakebook. But some content we can all agree upon we will not allow.

@ned or steemit, if you want to discuss this in more detail, feel free to contact me. Just leave a comment and we can talk online at some time.