Life With NewSteem: That Growing Army of Pesky Downvote Bots!

If you've been part of our community for any time at all, chances are you've been "flagged" by some "person" you have never heard of, who gave you a 10% downvote with their approximately 15SP weight.

These days, it seems like I hardly ever post without getting at least one of these, but sometimes as many as 4-5, on any given post.

How does flagging sit with you?

Functionally Speaking...

The bare facts of these miniature flags is that they have very little relevance... you're looking at a downvote from an account with a 25 reputation, about 15 (typically delegated) SP, downvoting at 10% with about 5060% of their voting power already used up.

If you're curious, you can always take a moment or two to examine the "actions" of one of these on @steemchiller's excellent SteemWorld.org app.

As you can see, this "robot account" does one thing, and one thing only: Engage in a systematic — and automated — process of downvoting 100's of accounts.

White Lavender

Steem Sustainability and... Psychology

These days, we talk a lot about the future of Steem, and our hopes that new developments in the pipeline and close to being rolled out — Communities/Hivemind, SMTs, and so forth — will help create a more sustainable and solid place for content creators, developers, investors and others.

I suppose one should not be too surprised that there will always be forces that want to see any given project fail, for whatever reasons... as seems to be the case with this small army of (usually) new accounts that serve no functional purpose other than to issue a stream of flags to everyone nearby.

I can't speak to why someone would put so much time and energy into abusing a system in order to seemingly try to break that system.

The sad thing is, though, when someone arrives in our community as a genuine new user, these little "nicks" can be very discouraging.

Snow on twigs...

The Dark Corners of a Decentralized System?

I suppose it is simply part of life that the strength of something can also be its weakness.

We often laud the benefits of a decentralized platform where there is no central "owner" to police speech, content and such... but the possible downside to that is also that there's no central owner to stop toxic activities.

It's a bit like having a public water well that nobody owns and everyone is responsible for using and maintaining... but because there is a lack of "rules" there is also nothing stopping something from slowly dripping a little poison into the well every single day while we all stand by and ponder why people are never feeling QUITE healthy.

Of course, it is easy to simply point to the functional end of what's taking place: Value-wise, this is all too insignificant to have an impact. True enough!

The question remains, however, of what the psychological "taste" left in people's mouths — especially newcomers' — might be.

Not claiming to have any solutions here, but I do find myself pondering the impact... Think about it!

Thanks for reading!

(Another #creativecoin creative non-fiction post)

Have YOU been "flagged" by one of these bots? How did that make you feel, even if the downvote was meaningless? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for this platform.)
Created at 20200116 15:12 PST
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