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RE: @berniesanders just flagged my post! Is there anything I can do?
It wasn't a vote, it was a flag.
Steemit's guidelines for flagging:
Flagging a post can remove rewards and make this material less visible. The flag should be used for the following:
Fraud or Plagiarism
Hate Speech or Internet Trolling
Intentional miscategorized content or Spam
It's not intended to be a down-vote or a disagreement tool, rather a way to discredit dishonest actors and to punish hateful behavior.
No, it was a vote. The flag icon, as well as calling it a flag and that insipid description are completely made up by the UI.
this is how i would flag this post in the cli
vote sigmajin richardcrill berniesanders-just-flagged-my-post-is-there-anything-i-can-do -100 true
this is how i would upvote it
vote sigmajin richardcrill berniesanders-just-flagged-my-post-is-there-anything-i-can-do 100 true
Now if you want to follow a bunch of made up rules, thats your perogative. But the whales do not. So what youre really supporting is a double standard. 1 set of completely arbitrary rules for most users and a completely different set of rules for the whales.
what happens on the blockchain is what matters, and the UI misrepresenting reality in this respect is counterproductive
I think people find little to no resistance in accepting the condition that higher SP accounts have greater voting power. It's both logical and fair that people with more at stake have more to gain from using the platform. Indeed, they should earn more from curation rewards and they deserve more say in how Steem is distributed.
However, when it comes to people losing money over votes (flag, down-vote, or whatever you prefer to call it), while it may still appeal to the aforementioned logic, I'm not so sure that it's seen as fair. The platform is set up to treat the up-vote and down-vote at 1:1 weight, but human psychology doesn't treat the monetary effect of those two sides of the scale at 1:1, probably something closer to 1:10, or maybe even 1:100.
To make my perspective a bit clearer: I'm convinced most users here agree that getting "majority vote" in terms of up-votes (on the scale of 10 to 1, or more) and STILL ending up with no payout and a negative reputation hit, due to a single high-SP account down-vote...well, it's a bit of a turn-off, to put it one way.
If we're after appealing to the masses and retaining them, then this topic of setting up the scales to fit our psychological (or, perhaps more accurately, "societal-imposed") model of "fairness" is of utmost importance.
Again, 100 upvotes to 2 downvotes resulting in negative reputation - that's a difficult one to sell as fair, even for the greatest of liars...er, I mean lawyers.
Now, if we were to set up the down-vote to remove the equivalent of the average weight of all prior votes, or average weight of votes within X amount of time...THAT might be a bit fairer. Now, you can't suddenly lose all the monetary gains of 30 - 40 upvotes to a single, disgruntled whale.
Hell, we can even allow for whales to have the equivalent of three or four times the average weight of upvotes in their downvotes. That might even pass off as fair, as, like I alluded to earlier, people can accept perks to high SP, TO AN EXTENT.
I admit, "fairness" is a subjective term. But there's a point at which the far majority agrees that something is or isn't fair and I fear that the pendulum has swung a tad too far into the unfair end in this current model.
Currently, my feeling is that the devs of Steemit intended to make it a bit of an "unwritten rule" that people not "disrespect" others by acting as if all will be okay by treating the up/down vote at 1:1; hence, providing the flag option along with GUIDELINES vs. PUNISHABLE LAWS (for abusing the rules), aiming at getting users to only use that option lightly and with extreme regard for the message that might be received on the other end of that action.
I think that experiment failed. Now it's time to scale down the weight of the down-vote, with respect to up-votes.
Remember, this is about appealing to mass acceptance. We're trying to reach consensus on what is fair, IF we're after mass adoption and user retention. If our sole concern is competing for monetary gains - a very short-sided outlook - well, then kiss your dreams of Steemit being a formidable rival to Reddit/ Facebook/ Twitter/ etc. goodbye, cuz the pure-greed approach will run this into the ground, IMO.
Exactly! Thank you!
See, the whole problem here is that you think what jamesbrown said was true, but it isnt. Its a vote. Nothing more or less. Steem rewards are based on a consensus algorithm and bernie didnt consent. So you got less rewards.
Ned, DTM, smooth, and all of the whales do and have done exactly what bernie did -- downvote material that they feel is overvalued, overexposed, or potentially harmful to the platform.
The problem is that you look at it, and you see the UI's ill-thought-out, poorly designed interpretation of it as a big red flag, and you think youre being attacked. Youre not.
The myth that a downvote is anything but a vote is one of the most harmful steem misconceptions out there. it creates a culture of negativity and is a large cpontributing factor in the huge reward disparity.