My Self-Experiment: Arbitrary Power Used By Arbitrary People

Steemit is decentralized which brings a lot of advantages. But there is also a great danger involved: it gives people power over other people who may not be able to defend themselves.

 
This has been a topic which has arisen quite a few times on steemit and there hasn't been found an adequate solution yet. What I mean is this: you might get censored by someone who has more voting power and can therefore hide your comments or prevent a payout of your posts even though there is no legitimate reason. The problem? You can't go anywhere and talk things over if the person in question is not interested in a dialogue.

It is simply a question of power: whoever has more voting power "wins".

Another problem is that automated anti-spamming-bots can't always distinguish between legitimate spam and posts which should not be flagged as spam. They simply use an algorithm to detect so-called spamming and blacklist users. While this has alleviated spamming problems on steemit, it does censor people who are falsely caught by the system.

To prevent unjustified blacklisting, spamming-detection-bots might have a discord channel like @steemcleaners do. The idea: you go there and appeal to someone to uplift the ban. While this sounds reasonable, I will show here that this does not always work.

The reason for this is that people who have been given this power can use this power in any way they wish. In other words, the arbitrary actions of the "handler" leaves room for abuse and prevents a correct handling of cases.

To demonstrate, here is an example of what happened to me.

I started by making several comments in which I self-voted myself to demonstrate how easy it is to use the system of steemit to his or her advantage (It should be discussed on steemit, however, if self voting actually really does constitute an illegitimate practice. For instance, is it really better to use voting bots rather than to self vote? But this is another discussion...)

You can see that my original posts were down voted by @mack-bot so that they will not have a pay-out. So far so good actually. A bot recognized self voting and removed the upvote. This is actually disproving my assumption that it is easy to "comment farm". good! (In hindsight I guess it would have made more sense to research about this topic first in order not to end up in this position...)

So what is the problem here?

The problem is how things got handled after that. I went to the @steemcleaners discord channel and appealed for removing my blacklisting. What followed was a not very enlightening conversation with @logic who was not able to understand my side. Here is an excerpt:

this ended up by myself being "timed out"

So what does that leave me with? I am not sure, really. I doubt that I can have a reasonable conversation with @logic. So will somebody else understand me? Maybe, maybe not.

And that is exactly my point: It is completely arbitrary. The decision to unblacklist me is dependent on a single person who is unwilling to see the background of my actions.

 
While I did not check the validity of other people's reason for being blacklisted, there are many users who feel that they have been wronged and almost have no way of explaining their position: