Flags have pretty much stopped in the #thunderdome
Only 6 out of the 49 posts posted in steemit.chat #thunderdome channel this year have received any flag, and most (if not all) of these were not #thunderdome related flags.
Here's the stated purpose of the channel:
Your original posts only - By posting here you accept that your post will be either up voted if perceived as quality OR FLAGGED if not
So obviously we're not up to the challenge any more, so I guess the results of the experiment are in.
Results
It seems that it's hard to bother enough to flag, and that the stigma of flagging, the popular interpretation that it is only for abuse, can not be overcome easily.
I stopped voting in any way because I took a break for the holiday season and didn't come back to reading them. Sorry guys, but I follow a lot of you guys anyway.
But what I observe in the voting pattern of most posts in the channel is cooperative voting, i.e. people supporting each other. This is a great thing to see. It seems that #thunderdome has turned into a "high quality" post link drop, instead of a the ruthless quality appraisal it was intended to be.
I guess I kind of saw this coming. @fknmayhem said the same to me, as well as others such as @lextenebris who have made arguments underlining how flagging costs are not balanced in favor of the flagger at all, making it not very worth while to do.
So our chaotic #thunderdome as progressed to the restored world of the Citadel. Or something 😅
This is a notice: #thunderdome is being shut down today!
It was a #flashproject that @tarazkp and I set up, and as I said before:
It will get shut down at some point, and probably sooner rather than later. We need ideas to be tested and then to iterate based on findings.
Question for all #thunderdome warriors: why did you stop flagging? What was your experience of the project?
Mentions in reverse order of appearance since 1st Jan: @emon.naim @geekpowered @gatakata @monopolytile @rawdawg @anaszarrouk (-1 point for asking for a vote) @lemony-cricket @greer184 @Kingly1 @erodedthoughts @kryptik @peace101 @saywha @lextenebris @andywong31 @val.halla @xhodan @personz @eonwarped @slangtionary
I've cut back on flagging since discussing it with @lextenebris. But I have not stopped.
I have avoided some flags towards people I know who posted in thunderdome though, just because I wanted to avoid the social repercussions. I also stopped even reading a certain person's posts, because I didn't want to keep flagging every single one.
But considering how little interaction I received from posting links, perhaps I was one of the only ones checking them occasionally. After the holidays anyway, which was the first time I managed to work up the nerve to try posting there. Although I feel I should have checked even more, and flagged even more.
Yeah, flags aren't beneficial. They redistribute rewards to the pool, which is bad unless more take more of a conscious effort to upvote quality content. I know I fail in some ways sometimes. Maybe I shouldn't upvote for effort. Maybe I should be more reserved in my percentage of upvotes. But I try.
A lot of people try. Not just for curation efforts, but for posts. And posting in thunderdome is an act of a desperate person, who doesn't feel they are getting enough interaction. Not just upvotes. I'm fine with my upvotes as they are now, but I kept posting in thunderdome, because I need more than just upvotes. I need interaction. I need discussion. Even occasionally that ass that rips your post to shreds. Thunderdome shouldn't go because you got a little more reserved in your flagging. Instead you should just understand that you're a bit more reserved, and accept that. Maybe talk about it. Discuss it.
It's a high quality link drop for a reason. People fear they will get flagged. You don't even have to flag at 100%. Flag at 1% if you want. But now, where will people go when they're desperate? Discord? Man, fuck discord.
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I don't know, I'm not very sympathetic to people who feel desperate on Steemit, this is not an income stream to rely on. Probably if you even consider it an income stream you've gone too far. I get it that people come from a variety of difficult life situations, my own situation is hard in many ways, but it's a mistake to count on votes, I've said it many times before and I'll continue to. If that is what you're saying, it sounds kind of like it. 😅
There's nothing stopping you from starting the next project! This was a #flashproject which was always intended to be run for a limited time. It doesn't mean the authors and creators need to disband.
On the issue at hand though, the flags themselves, yea it was always going to be a difficult experiment, and almost certainly going to fail, I think both @tarazkp and I knew that. It was just to see what would happen, could people really do it? And not if it would fail but probably how. You may have forgotten, maybe everyone did, but by joining the room you are agreeing to not only allow yourself to get flagged but you were supposed to flag anything you didn't think was quality. So really we all did not follow the instructions, simple as.
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As I stated, I was referring to more than just votes.
Maybe you forgot what it was like to be a newbie on here. Or maybe you never had that difficulty. But posting on steemit can sometimes feel like shouting into the void.
Maybe you think your post is awesome, and you'll get praise, and it will appear on trending, and...nope. Not even a reply. Maybe a cent.
I've gotten curried before, and I still felt like a hollow victory. Sure, the money was nice. That's not what I'm talking about.
Some people are desperate to get more interaction, and get their posts noticed. It's not just about money.
Everyone always seems to say to not focus on the money, but then every time you talk about interaction, they bring up money.
Also, I might have cheated once or twice by not flagging, but I flagged one person so much that I was convinced if I flagged them any more it would be abuse on my part. And they weren't just posting crap, but plagiarism and copyright violation. They just didn't learn.
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I'm not saying the focus can't be on the money, I'm just saying you can't expect the money. But I think you have to do a kind of magic eye picture thing with money on Steemit, if you focus on it directly you won't do well unless you're already rich, but if you look away from money you also won't be guided by what works.
I do remember what it was like at the beginning, it was sometimes like that, shouting into the void. It still is sometimes. Actually just yesterday I was looking back over some old posts and it was pretty different when the vote of someone with a few thousand SP was still just a couple of cents. It feels pretty different now.
My best advice is always this: interact with others and they'll interact with you. You can shout into the void one way but you'll only connect with people if you read their stuff first, comment insightfully on their stuff first, and they might check out your stuff later.
Lol I saw those flags, they looked like all to do with abuse, not content quality (although obviously can be both). Was it ever just content quality and not because of plagiarism and copyright violation?
It's interesting that you felt reluctant to continue flagging them even though that was the express purpose of the channel. Do you not think you could have continued flagging because they agreed to allow for it by link dropping in #thunderdome?
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I was more hesitant on quality, but I still flag for quality, even outside of thunderdome. But I won't flag 100% unless the rewards are high, and the quality is crap.
I felt like it was someone else's turn to flag them, and no one was.
So, multiple people dropped the ball.
I don't think the idea was a bad one though. I think it mainly just needed more interaction and discussion. People kept feeling hesitant, and apparently were afraid to discuss it. Perhaps because there wasn't that discussion already occurring.
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Maybe that was my fault then, I banned discussion in the channel 😅 I just didn't want people fighting over it and getting emotional, which did start to happen, but maybe that was a mistake.
Yes for real, multiple people dropped the ball. If you acted as you say then your probably the thunderdome champion. 🤝 🚀
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If anyone ever does a live thunderdome, with discussion, I'd like to see that.
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I was pretty tempted to flag one to follow rules, but in the end I decided not to, and I don't remember why.
It was an interesting experiment though, I was half expecting some flags my way on the basis of quality judgement, but I didn't get any.
I guess nobody likes getting flags, so flag worthy content just stopped showing up?
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That was an explicit goal of mine. I wondered if people would only drop their best stuff there since to not do so would increase your perceived chances of getting flagged. And people who were too sensitive to getting flagged stopped coming completely. But then the flags stopped so it didn't have an impact, though the cultural tone was more or less set. Still, people were allowing what I would consider to be quite low quality posts to get away with no flags.
I think it's a case of the prohibitive version of the Golden Rule right?
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I've made some arguments in this field before, but I'd like to go just a little bit further, if I may.
I suspect that ThunderDome would have had a longer running existence if it had been solely for the dropping of links which were strongly expected to get flagged, but it would've had a much smaller audience. Sort of like the trash dump. Everyone wants to go once in a while, but they don't like to hang out there for long. They keep coming back, they do their part, but it's not something that becomes a compelling part of their lives – hopefully.
It's far more gratifying to find a group of people who support strong content as an expectation and bring them things that they will like. That's where the reward curve is. Of course, if ThunderDome had been for that from the beginning – it probably wouldn't have done as well as it did for so long. After all, there are a dozen other really good groups who are very upfront about wanting to do the job of proper curation.
Down votes are only fun if you enjoy punching that particular person in the face. We all want to punch spammers in the face. We all want to punch people who throw crap on the blockchain square in the face. But your arm gets tired after a while and really you would just rather have these people who have good taste that you trust look at some of your work and say, "hey, what you think about this?"
And that's exactly what happened.
Myself, I'd like to see somebody make a game show out of ThunderDome – though that would probably require making some sort of standalone website to support it. Everyone who wants to be involved submits a single link and one steem. Once a week the submissions go up for a vote, everyone who chipped in picks "the winner," who is then summarily down voted by everyone in the pool, and then all of the steem that was invested gets cut up equally and sent out to everyone that gave a down vote.
(For extra comedy value, make that literally everyone who put a down vote on that post, whether they are involved in the game show or not.)
That might be fairly entertaining, though the specific numbers might need to be jiggled about a bit.
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I think you're right, whatever weird mix of idea thunderdome had in people's brains allowed it to bootstrap into the non-exclusive more or less high quality curated content feed it became.
Lol, sounds like it would work just as badly as the thunderdome as it is now though.
How about the opposite way, as you said, people prefer to support strong content, at least those who consider themselves to be creating strong content too.
So everyone sends in 1 STEEM to the game show account, and one link of their own posts which they consider to be excellent in a declined payout comment on a post made by the central account. People vote on the post by up voting the comment, but only votes by people who contributed 1 STEEM and a link are considered. The person with the highest number of votes, regardless of SP etc., gets the entire prize money. Maybe there could be a 80/20 split with a runner up too.
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No, see – that's just advertising. We already have systems that do that. Those are the upvote bots that everyone hates, except for everyone using them. They pay some money into an account and have a chance of getting more out in upvotes than they invested for that purpose.
That's why the "find the worst possible content" drive is interesting. It might not be useful in any grand sense, but it might be entertaining.
I generally try not to re-implement systems which already exist.
Also, getting the conversation off of the blockchain is kind of a big deal, in my mind. Or at least getting the protocol off the blockchain. A standalone website where people could submit things locally,, which manages dealing with votes and the like – that's a good idea. If it had its own account for publicity's sake, posting about ongoing games etc. – that would work, but the bulk of the operations really need to get off of the blockchain because what we trade is security for privacy. This seems like the sort of thing where a certain measure of privacy might be nice.
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I see your point. It's still an improvement on upvote bots because there's a higher chance of those people actually reading your posts.
I don't care that much about the idea so whatever.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I always use an existing system if I can but I don't shy away from creating a better version of something.
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It has to be actively better, which can be a real problem.
Right now, what the platform really needs is someone to create a generalized community management system which allows you to read, interact with, and right content which is intended to fit at least one specialized theme – though it could be good for multiple things.
I feel like we are recapitulating the evolution of online communities from the ground up, which makes me rather grumpy in general that the basics of this sort of thing weren't implemented day zero, but we've got what we've got.
Ontology recapitulates philology.
Or something like that.
One-stop shopping where I can say, "hey, I want to read things about tabletop role-playing games," and have only those things with some level of curation/moderation in front of me, and in turn go "hey, I just wrote something about tabletop role-playing games, maybe they would like it" – that would be something useful.
It almost makes me think that what we really want to rip off is the old Publication idea/metaphor from Medium, because it's a straightforward idea that involves actual curation, assembles content that people might want to see, and provides it as a stream. The basic elements exist in the system as it stands, it just doesn't seem that anyone has put them together with the right architecture to make it useful. Utopian is about as close as we've seen, and it aspires to way too ambitious a scope to be useful for this purpose.
But that's just me wandering around an idea.
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That's exactly the problem I'm concerned with 😄
I hear you. I think it's like a lot of the AI experiments Google are doing for example, they work out a system and just throw a lot of data at it and hope something cool comes out in the end. We have a long way to go to get the kind of refinement of general AI, the stuff they're making now is so bounded, I don't think people realize.
In the case of Steemit the idea seems to be that a few simple rules will lead to emerging good services if you throw a load of people at it with the incentive of getting some voted money, a la a complex system. I can hear @ned responding to the above by saying, "sure, why don't you build it?". Because they see Steem not as the solution but the platform for solutions. But the problem is it's not featured enough for that.
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To dip into my usual mode of vulgarity, I would be forced to respond, "because you ain't paying me to do it, bitch."
Which really reveals the underlying problem with that strategy, which is the people that are competent to solve the problem aren't always gamblers. I know that we have a culture of embracing stupidly risk-seeking behavior in the tech field in general and particularly in cryptocurrency, but most competent people don't want to do that. The obsession with it at a subcultural level is a problem for actually solving problems because the kind of people who are willing to go all in for six months on solving a problem that might pay the rent for the next six months are not the same kind of people who are around in a year to make sure that the problem continues getting solved. There is, after all, no more risk in it, and this leads to a fixation on short-term projects, the abandonment of a lot of long-term projects which have effectively met their intent, and the technology sector built on trying to arbitrage boom/bust cycles and not, instead, actually solve problems for people and keep solving them.
I might be a little bitter, though.
Additionally, if I were interested enough in solving the problem of building a social media platform from the ground up, why would I want to tie it to a blockchain on which I don't own most of the coinage? Even if I did put together the world's greatest social media exchange, where everyone can build a community, everyone is comfortable reading and sharing, and things were – impossibly – balanced so that most people were happy, why would I want to give it to the whales on Steemit? The basic technology is open source. People ICO new coins all the time with a far less effective idea of "why this would be useful."
Which is exactly why "so pay me" is the only sensible answer to the expected question. "So instead of me taking my ideas and building your competitor, I do it for you."
This is a core issue when your basic business strategy is "someone else will build it for us." It's one of the reasons that while everyone else is all starry eyed about SMTs, I'm trying to figure out what the angle is that makes them particularly useful – except for the fact that they, in theory, would be natively exchangeable with STEEM which would give them an automatic exchange rate with fiat currency.
But this is a whole swarm of different, if related, issues going on in this particular space.
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@acidyo did live curations, perhaps @transisto can do live flagging on Dlive
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I think it would be more beneficial to run it in #postpromotion
A team of experienced flaggers and curators that take a random hour shift per week to run through and flag and comment why as they come through the door. Perhaps @patrice can organise it as it may make the @steemcleaner job easier in the future either through education or early targeting.
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That would certainly be a bigger pool. If flagging gets rebranded as down voting in the steemit.com UI I'll propose it and try to start something maybe. I think we learned that as it stands people just are not willing to use flags in this way. That's fine, it's a result.
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My standard for content is pretty low. So far, I have only flagged blatant spam or stolen content in the months I've been here. All the traffic was relatively low and the content was superior to other available feeds.
Also, nobody wants to be the one asshole that flags, given the lack of a flagging culture, everybody decided to be nice to each other. That being said, there were times that I have been tempted to be that asshole.
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I had to be that person(z) at the start just to get it going, or try to but yea I didn't want to be the only one. I left it alone for a while to see what would happen also as I felt I was too biased in the experiment to really be a part of it, I'm probably the opposite to you, my standard is pretty high, though I'm very keen to support certain people as a consideration far above how I see the standard of a post.
Well hey, why doesn't someone else create another flash project that's not thunderdome, but is some other attempt at a high quality feed? Or even propose it and I'll admin it.
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Oh no!
#thunderdome was a really cool idea, even though I was only there for like, 2 days. I think I heard about it first when @geekpowered mentioned it. I liked the idea of challenging myself to produce content that would "pass the test." I didn't see any content not worth upvoting the entire time, except for once, which was actually my fault (I'll get to that in a second).
I must say I lost a bit of interest, however, after I got frustrated and sent someone there who kept post-promoting in #general with no moderators present. I was very careful with my words. I said something to the effect of, "#thunderdome is the place to go for votes." I did not specify up or down....
I thought they would read the rules, but I'm not sure why, because they clearly didn't read the rules for #general either. The post was a single copy-pasted photo with the title "Beautiful music." I though to myself, "this is it; they're going to get pwned."
But I didn't flag it, and nobody else did either, because I decided I'm too nice to flag people, and it's kind of pointless for me to waste my vote on flagging someone who's making two cents from a self-voted post when I can use that same voting power to upvote an actual contributor. I think everyone else probably came to the same conclusion. It's kind of sad, because it really did create a place where most of the stuff was quality, and that will be gone now.
RIP #thunderdome.
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Yes I agree with you there, the experiment has cemented that for me and showed the deficiency of the flagging system here. That's a good result though, so the experiment was not a waste!
It was a flash project to begin with so on to the next one! Have you got a tweak on the idea or another idea you'd like to propose from what you learned?
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RIP
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Any thoughts on things?
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Dear Friend
Your every post I think it's great.
Why do I know enough to know it and the fans.
Your article inspired me to think in detail
Dare me to your journey.
So I want your sincere cooperation, the way of walking.
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Just because you advocate anonymity doesn't mean you have to enforce it on others, this reckless use of power is disturbing, you didn't know about my chat history with someone and flagged a comment without thinking. Kindly do research or wait for replies before taking decisions on other's part.
I'm connected to the said person on discord, we were spamming and talking in comments so felt it was better to take it to chat.
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I took a decision on my own part. People are can flag without explaining why, what's the system.
But if you are not a spammer then I did make a mistake. I have reversed the flag, only because my intention for flagging was thinking you were another spammer.
No hard feelings? 😅
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No worries!
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