The Flag, The Down Vote... my semi-frequent update to this idea... hopefully those in favor of the downvote read it

in #flag8 years ago (edited)

I am not a fan of the flag used against posts for reasons other than spam, abuse, or plagiarism. I occasionally write a post on this subject. I know not all people agree with me, but I continue to watch and usually it is some activity that inspires me to write the post again. It HAS NOT been done to me so it is not me whining about someone attacking me. I post these posts because, I do not see the activity as positive or good for the steemit/steem community. I cannot force people to agree with me, and I wouldn't if I could, because I do think "good ideas do not require force" is a very true statement. I can keep writing my occasional revised thoughts on the subject though and perhaps persuade people or in dialog be myself persuaded.

I have approached this many times and ultimately I keep coming to the question "What is the actual value of the downvote?"

There are a couple of PROS that come up.

  • It is a way to deal with spam, plagiarism, and abuse.
  • It enables a way to redistribute steem power of potential rewards pool by those who believe it is being rewarded too much.

There are a number of CONS that come up.

  • It can feel like an attack.
  • It can turn a place that feels censorship free, and open into a more hostile environment.

What do we do here?


What is it we actually do here? We blog. We write, video, play music, and have dialog over information we create and share.

Is there any analog to that in our history? Yes. Literature, Music, Videos, etc.

So where do you get these things? You go to a news stand, a bookstore, a music store, etc.

When you walk into these stores what do you do about the things you think suck or that you have no interest?

I think most of us simply ignore them. We focus on the things we are interested in.

When you are in these stores are you looking for little check marks to tell you how many people disliked it? If it is digital I may look for stars or eggs (newegg), but that is a different scale and is not a down vote equivalent. Sometimes that is irrelevant depending on if it is an interest, and most of those places typically only permit voting on those things by people that purchased it. Some of them even wait a bit before asking. They do not simply let anyone come along and vote down anything they dislike as 0 or 1 star.

So where is this done?

Reddit.

Is reddit popular? Yes. I suspect it could be more popular. There are people that do not use it due to how hostile it can feel.

What makes reddit hostile? Two things.

  1. The down vote, and getting down vote brigaded, down voted without any comments, or perhaps the down vote was simply for TL;DR.
  2. Getting trolled in comments.


Source: Know Your Meme

We don't have a terrible time with trolling on steemit. I suspect a lot of this is due to the reputation system, and that this would be considered abuse and attacking other users. It translates to not really receiving much of a reward and damaging your account. This for the most part seems much less an issue on steemit than any other platform I've seen.

The down vote which isn't even in the voting area and is shaped like a flag on steem has the same impact as on reddit, and then some. It can reduce your potential reward. If it goes below zero it can potentially damage your reputation as well.

Redistribution


A common defense used by people with power who do have sufficient power to reduce the potential reward (sometimes by a substantial amount) will use is the idea that THEY saw no value in the post for the steemit platform. They thus decided that the portion of the reward pool that was going to that post would be better allocated by cancelling out some of the steem power allocated to that post and redistributing that across the pool.

This may sound warm and fuzzy unless you REALLY take the time to think about it.

We accumulate steem power for several reasons. Only one of these is as investment into the platform. If it did not have other impact that would be the only reason we would do it, and then shareholder and boardroom concepts might be relevant. That is NOT the only reason, and in reality for many it likely is not even the most compelling of reasons. Having steem power has a noticeable effect. It allows us to reward things WE are interested in as individuals at a greater amount. We are putting our STAKE towards things we are interested in.

If I decide to commit my STAKE to a pool voluntarily and allow someone to dictate where that goes that is one thing. That is voluntary.

If someone else can come along and cancel out where I chose to place my interest, that is another thing.

The problem with the way the down vote and redistribution argument works here is that it is INVOLUNTARILY canceling out someone elses interest. It did not really matter whether you thought it had no value, or you disliked the topic. The person that voted for it obviously DID see value, and did have an interest. Do they not have a right to use their steem power?

Involuntary redistribution is analogous to theft. It comes with the impact of a down vote like reddit, yet it has the added impact of also reducing payout.

The common answer to this is that "it was not theft, as that was potential payout." It is already potential payout without the down vote due to the distribution of the steem power votes, and the changing market value of steem. That word "potential" does not justify canceling out someone elses interest. Whether YOU liked it or found it valuable is truly irrelevant. Move on. Let people express their likes. The pool will adjust based upon people's likes. It does not need you forcing your will upon others as to what they SHOULD and SHOULD NOT like or view as valuable.

That way lies force, aggression, anger, bitterness, and a much less inclusive community than we could be.

The platform wasn't built for up vote only


Another argument is that the platform was not built with the idea of up vote only. This is true, it was patterned after reddit. Yet if people only use up votes what happens? The up votes are distributed across the pool based upon steem power and rewards are given out accordingly. That seems pretty fair, and like it will WORK even if it wasn't designed that way.

Unless it is to be the kingdom ruled by a few where they can dictate what people CAN and CANNOT be rewarded for even when it is not plagiarism, is not spam, and is not abusive, then that becomes a very unpleasant environment. A Plutocracy in fact.

Censorship


There is a true statement that content cannot be truly censored on steemit due to it being on the blockchain. This is indeed true. However, if a person's rewards are reduced to zero for subjective reasons, their reputation dinged, or perhaps their rewards simply reduced so low they can't really justify extra effort they may have been doing then it can effectively be very similar to censorship. The article may still be on the blockchain, though the person may have been ran out of town by the would be plutocrats. This technically is not censorship. It is damn close.

Exit on the Positive


With all of these things said. Steemit/Steem has amazing potential. On the trolling front it is already way better than any other social media I am aware of. Yet it could be better than REDDIT.

We can learn from the mistakes of reddit rather than emulating them. The fact of the matter is that if all people did was up vote it would still produce a number, still be sortable and ranked, without ANY change. The rewards would still be distributed based upon votes and based upon STEEM POWER, but it would be an accurate reflection of actual interest as opposed to some deciding what people CAN/SHOULD or CANNOT/SHOULD NOT like.

We have the potential to be an amazingly friendly and open place of discourse sharing, and potential reward. I never felt hindered or the need to second guess what I might write until the first time I saw people getting flagged for subjective reasons. Why does anyones disinterest or dislike in a subject matter? If that were how things were I'd be down voting/flagging EVERY single sport post. I have zero interest in the topic. Yet I know a lot of people do like it. Whether I don't or not is irrelevant, just like it is irrelevant when I go into ANY store to purchase something.

NOTE: If you feel like I am trying to force you to subjectively stop imposing your will upon others, should I really have to force you to stop that?


Steem On!




EDIT: some people may have missed it and may start responding to this post. My current view after discussion, and reading the post by @bitcoindoom can be found here.

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I view down vote as up voting everyone else, but the downvoted item, just more efficient. Every upvote implicitly reduces rewards of everyone else.

I view down vote as up voting everyone else, but the downvoted item, just more efficient.

What if everyone viewed the flags (that's what they're called on the site) this way? What if, instead of every post having something like 100 upvotes, they had 50 upvotes and 50 flags? What purpose would that serve? Instead of flagging content that you don't like, why not just upvote the things you do like, as curation was intended?

The system calls it a "flag" and it's treated as some form of abuse. That's how users see it. The code treats upvotes as a reward for the content, while it sees a flag as a punishment to reputation and the removal of rewards. I don't see how either of the latter options are a good thing. What is the actual benefit of flagging when it's based on content preferences?

"To redistribute rewards," is the common response. But as @dwinblood points out - why do you feel that the rewards that were allocated by other stakeholders to certain users ought to be redistributed to others rather than voting for those other users yourself with your own stake? Or do you think it would be right to flag one post because you don't like the potential payout, then also upvote other content that you do like and think deserves more rewards?

I just don't see the efficiency of everyone flagging posts that they don't like as a way to allocate rewards to posts that they do like. The upvote is more than capable of taking care of stake-weighted rewards allocation, isn't it?

The best example I can give to the conundrum Dan has to face on solving this. Your sock puppets you found. They are the perfect example of how it can be gamed. So what programmatic thing could answer that without having other potential negative ramifications.

It is a tough problem. I am just glad to see he agrees, he simply doesn't know how to do it yet. So with time maybe we can all solve that problem.

Well, it seems to be one of those things that's exacerbated because of the fairly small number of users and the skewed distribution of stake right now. If this was a platform six months or a year into the future with 100,000+ active daily, or even weekly users, would those things even make a difference? If distribution of STEEM Power was more like 5000 users holding the top 20%, would we still have to worry about gaming and collusion like that? I can't imagine it would be as big of a deal as it would be in the current environment.

I believe it will always be a potential problem. Especially for new users. They are the ones that can get swatted like a fly. I HOPE that it would get better.

We also have pretty smart users. What happens when some wealthy SJWs join, and swat anyone that triggers them, and swat all of that person's posts.

I think it could get worse if we get bigger, because we'll likely attract a lot different type of people.

But if it's upvote only, they couldn't do that. That's what I was talking about in my comment above.

But if it's upvote only, they couldn't do that. That's what I was talking about in my comment above.

Sure. Yet in an up vote only situation how would we stop sock puppets from getting most of the steem power votes, powering up themselves, and then voting on even more sock puppets? You could quickly have a concentration of power with no real way to tame it.

It sounds like Dan is in favor of up vote only if a way can be devised that is resistant to quickly being gamed.

Yeah, I knew that every up vote implicitly reduces the rewards. I don't know your actual algorithm, but I assume you're essentially taking the TOTAL STEEM POWER across all posts at a given time snapshot and then determining the percentage of that total each post has, and then awarding the percentage of the reward pool based upon that.

This is me guessing. If that is not the case then let me know as a different arrangement would likely change my view.

There is a difference here though. We all understand potential payout so if we are up voting it will adjust the price across the platform. It does not target and selectively cancel out specific people, topics, etc.

The down vote does that. If there are people interested in a niche topic and it is not spam, abuse, or plagiarism then a down vote by someone that doesn't like that topic could KILL any potential to earn by people that do like that topic. Since it is niche that is likely a very small reward, but it is still something.

Also I DO trust you and Ned. I know you've seen my other posts on this. I've been occasionally vocal about it. I am still looking for a really compelling reason for a down vote beyond spam, plagiarism, and abuse and I just don't get it.

I do not see how disinterest or someone else subjectively thinking something someone else is interested in is not worth that much is relevant.

I did see some people gaming the system and consistently up voting sock puppet accounts. I also realize that down votes ended up being the only way to combat that. (combat) Could that be considered abuse? That's dancing a fine line. I've considered that is a case beyond plagiarism, spam, and abuse that it makes sense. It'd need to be proven I think.

And yes this is no EASY PROBLEM. I'm not expecting you to hit the red "It's Easy" button and fix things.

Thanks for your response.

Without power to cut the bad, the good gets lost.

Eventually people will realize that if they all upvote one thing and then split rewards proportionally that they can capture rewards for nothing.

You are not thinking like an attacker attempting to get something for nothing.

True I am not thinking as someone trying to game the system. There has to be another way. Yet it is definitely NOT an easy problem.

I want an upvote only system, but have yet to identify an ungameable approach.

It's good to see you write that. What is it specifically that isn't preventable? Is it just the collusion aspect of it?

Well I will keep thinking and share if I think of anything. It definitely is a tricky situation. I think it is doable, but I don't think it will be simple. It definitely will require some out of the box thinking to get there.

Also, I don't know an algorithmic way of doing this yet. So all I really have is the occasional attempt to REASON with those that are powerful and seem to be subjective in their wielding of the steem powered sword. Perhaps I can get through to them. I don't LIKE writing these posts. It seems like I write one about once a month. It is usually in reaction to seeing people hammered by someone, or seeing a particularly moving post by someone else that was impacted.

Tonight was inspired by Mr. Wang's post. He was not my only inspiration, he was just the tipping point.

So if you see my every month or so post... that would likely be my goal. Sway some minds via words and persuasion.

Until you, I, or some unknown genius provides us with a workable programmatic approach.

An upvote only system would be very unifying and good for community morale, nice to know you are thinking along those lines.

IMO this might be impossible to have system which will maximize happiness of voter with upvote system only.

Do you know STV system?

This shows, that people need to have a way of saying that if their choice "not win", then they prefer seeing 3 other things before seeing particular X as a winner.

you should drop your hashtags down to 4.. there is a hashtag bug that limits your exposure to the main tag if you use all 5 TAGS... drop the most unimportant tag and get the exposure you deserve. btw, wrote this before reading... now I will read :)

upvoted for the discussion, but i disagree with your position vehemently.

Yeah, downvoting is important to stop people form gaming the system, but thats beside the point.

The point of downvoting is that we're alocating a fixed reward pool, and, especially in a system that uses quadratic vote weighting and has many big players, there have to be mechanisms to address a percieved shortfall in the allocated rewards (the post made too little, so im upvoting it) and an equally efficient mechanism to address a percieved excess in allocated rewards....

A system of upvotes will tend to "clump" rewards -- that is to say create an environment where a very few get a huge portion of the reward pool while most get nothing or almost nothing... were not great now in this regard, but it will only get worse as time goes on and whales entrench behind known writers.

I wrote a post about this recently, and why the downvote works objectively better than the upvote for this purpose... you can check it in my blog if youre interested.

The problem with the flag is that perceptions of what 'flags' are, has already been ingrained in peoples internet language. It would seem to me that putting a downvote button next to the upvote button takes away the 'flagging' idea and then it would be similar to a reddit style voting system (which is a language that people are quite familiar with). If the frontend stopped making the voter identifications public, that would avoid people impulsively going on a revenge spree. I'm assuming there are issues with this because of the blockchain being publically accessible, but at least make people work to find out who downvotes them. I'm sure some third party website would jump at the opportunity to provide that service.

It would seem to me that putting a downvote button next to the upvote button takes away the 'flagging' idea and then it would be similar to a reddit style voting system (which is a language that people are quite familiar with).

thats the way it originally was (a reddit style down chevron). The "flag" exists in the UI only. The idea was to discourage people from using it arbitrarily, but it had the unintended effect of of causing far more buthurtedness.

The voter identifications aren't the problem (and yeah, its easy to see it on the blockchain)

The problem is that if the aggregate total of votes is displayed, it doesnt draw everyones attention to it.

100 upvotes and 1 downvote just shows as 99 total votes. But with the big red flag easily identifiable on the side, it shows as 100 upvotes and some guy telling you to fuck yourself.

What is the obstacle to changing it back?

i think its one part inertia, one part people being concerned that it will encourage downvoting

I changed my position some... there was a follow up post I made at the request of @dantheman after discussion and reading the post by @bitcoindoom.

Wow that's a great post! Got a Flag yesterday without any reason, I agree with u totally on this post. It should not be abused because you dont agree to some ones idéas or thoughts. It should be used for spam and other things that ruins steemit.

Edit: Upvoted and resteemed!

I write a post like this every month or so it seems. I keep looking for ways to explain it and also looking for valid reasons to justify a down vote.

If that were how things were I'd be down voting/flagging EVERY single sport post.

Well, I sure am glad that we're friends!

I still haven't figured out why people feel the need to flag based on content preferences. I hear all of the arguments...but I don't think any of them are actually good. Oh, sure - the downvote might reduce the rewards for that one post because you feel that it's too high. But if your influence is large enough to make a difference, why not just go and vote for the things that you like? Make a positive impact on users rather than a negative one.

The only time people like flagging is when something is flagged that they don't like. Any other time, "It's abusive!" Grow up, folks. The system is what it is. If you don't like it, don't participate. Ignore it. Go support what you like. We don't care about your Content Crusading. You're making this a not fun place.

I wouldn't downvote sports even if we weren't friends. It is simply a topic I've really not had much interest in my entire life. This bummed my father out a great deal.

Yeah, I remember the discussion we had a while back when I wrote about sports and anarchists. Like it was yesterday!

I very rarely will watch a sport MOVIE about some true story or something and enjoy them. So there are exceptions. Sports just don't do it for me. My dad would watch two football games on TV (one in PIP) and some on the internet and be yelling and exciting. I TRIED several times to get into it. I was bored out of my mind.

I've seen a baseball game live in person once... and being at the stadium eating hot dogs and such wasn't so bad. Not something I'd be excited to do often.

I've seen a hockey game. More active and not bad.

I've been to a Denver Broncos game... God that was worse than watching it on TV. I don't drink alcohol... Football at the stadium... 3 minutes of nothing followed by 10 seconds of action. If you happened to be looking the wrong way you would miss it. At least on TV they have the instant replays...

Oh I was also really pissed off at the "so-called fans" they amounted to what my dad called Fair Weather Friends. Broncos was not doing so good so they actually started getting up and leaving early rather than trying to be supportive of their team. It was not a small number of people that did this.

All I could think is "These people are dicks!"

Somebody got pissed off at something I had to say and they went into my blog and flagged almost everything I had posted, including some posts that were not mine but they thought they were because everything I resteem ends up in my blog...

Regardless of how the flag works and whether it's good or bad or neither, it is undeniable that the flag is being perceived as a way to hurt another by many. Very few people see the flag as a good thing, and I can't blame them because the flag everywhere else is bad news.

Yes even @dantheman is aware of this. He is just in the tough position of determining a way to do away with it without leaving the entire environment open to be easily gamed.

I disagree with some posts here, but just don't vote on those. I think the 'flag' should be mainly used to deal with abuse. The issues are that most of us don't have enough SP for our flagging to do much and we worry about retaliation

The system is designed to promote the community to deal with issues, if the community has the SP to deal with it. There are no rules established to determine when an abuser should be targeted. Abusers like bernie keep going and no one stops these people. Why? No rules. So nothing to be done about it unless everyone or a majority agree to do something about it. No consequences for abusing your power usually.

Rules need to be established so we can correct the imbalances of abuse of power. An anarchistic model like community rule, only works when the consciousness of people trying to operate that way know how to operate that way so that they can create that way. The community as a whole has a lot of learning to do about anarchism, psychology, philosophy, etc. Otherwise, founders, set up some rules. I trust the founders more than I trust a mob of confused community members trying to go in different directions.

strongly agree. i also would question the people who end up on cheat-ah's blacklist. i find people who have even their valid posts gang flag raped by over a dozen cheat-ahs, because they made mistakes in the past. there are 100 or more cheat-ah bots, and they are free to run amok and gang flag valid posts? what gives? i have seen this send multiple people into the negative reputation digits. not sure if this is relevant to this post, but it does involve what i see as flag abuse. who gets cheat-ah's payouts anyway?

Cheetah was programmed by @anyx I believe. Writing a bot can be tricky. It's not a person so it is a balancing act. I haven't really noticed Cheetah being used intentionally bad, though I have seen it make mistakes. @anyx also seems like a pretty decent person.

he may be, but i have seen time and again what i described. sometimes it appears to be someone who does not speak english well and may not understand why they are being flagged into oblivion by a dozen bots or more. i think this discourages people from using the platform. there is no telling how many countless hours people have had to spend dealing with the results of this bot spawned abuse. i have created, for myself a practice i call flag mining. i spend at least an hour a week finding flagged posts and seeing what's in them. normally if i see something flagged, i just move on. sometimes, paying deliberate attention to only flagged posts has yielded some interesting results. i can see patterns in what gets flagged out of opinion. i also get to see which whales chronically misbehave. sometimes i just find cool posts.

I agree. Yet I am also a programmer. I know writing a perfect bot is next to impossible. I also did get a chance to see what it was like here before Cheetah. It is WAY WAY better. We had accounts posting new posts every 5 minutes and you could tell they were just bots scraping news sites and snagging an image... there were so many of them it was hard to find the real posts.

sounds annoying, and no way would i want the job of writing bots for fighting the crap. i hope the other problems get worked out though. thanks for keeping the debate alive.

Yeah it truly is a tough problem. Right now I am more trying to change MINDS of people, as I don't see an easy way to solve this problem yet programmatically.

I feel that a negative vote is needed. The only current place for negative energy to go is into the flag. And those have lots of negatives with it.

So, when someone is upset with the content, but not really wanting to put it into words, a down vote would be good. A place to blow off the steam.

I feel the best implementation would be to have a + count and a - count, as two separate number.

I also feel that I am shooting myself in the foot here. As much that I want to write about is usually gets knee jerk responses of it needs to be peer reviewed.... or some such.

You can put your feelings into a comment as well. Again, like I said... when you walk anywhere else that has earnings based upon literature, music, movies, etc what do you do? I believe you go pick up something you are interested in and walk to the counter and leave with that. You probably don't stop to pull out a big red marker and draw big check marks all over the Richard Simmons work out video. :)

If you really want to express dislike. You can try to do so reasonably in comments, without taking away someone elses interest.

You probably don't stop to pull out a big red marker and draw big check marks all over the Richard Simmons work out video.

That would be a good social experiment to conduct! Then we can report on it here and see what lessons we have learned!

I don't tend to put myself in situations where I'll get attacked or thrown in jail. Or possibly attacked and then thrown into jail.