RE: Operation Clean Trending
I agree with your analysis, I think the whole idea of self-voting and bot voting is extremly misguided and said as much in the beginning. But then everybody answered : "these are the rules of this platform, if you don't like it you can go away". Ok, if these are the rules and self-voting and bots are part of the game then what people are doing is just playing the game by the rules.
I agree the game is rigged (a guy from Nairobi or Aceh has little chance to be able to buy several hundred $ worth of bot voting) but the solution is not "opininon wars" that are ultimately destructive ("I think your content is not valuable so I harm you") but rather correcting the problem from its root.
The root of the problem is the "Sybil attack" that the Steem whitepaper acknowledges as a challenge yet it brings no solution, quite the contrary it lets the reader think that it is a good thing to have a system that is vulnerable :
The flagging was not intended for "over-valued" posts - especially when the guy paid for the exposure with his money, it was intended for spam, trolling, etc.
The cure is worth than the disease because it seeds discord and calls for revenge, it generates destructive strife instead of healing and community building. It distracts from encouraging constructive contribution and channels effort and energy into destructive behaviour.
Have a look for instance at the ideas that are presented and inform this post from @lishu, especially the Ted talks he links to.
Every educator will tell you that in order to build and educate gently you need to 1. encourage desirable behaviour (obviously) and 2. ignore undesirable behaviour. Punishing should only be reserved for extreme cases.
To get back to solving Steemit abuse, I am convinced that the solution is to have true, real, provable identities.
As you hinted, the value should be indicated by the communities (plural, very important ! otherwise we go toward a mirror image of the "politically correct" that so suffocate our societies today). But you can't build communities when you don't know who you are talking about, when you cannot tell whether two accounts are of the same person or of two different persons or are bots.
This platform has no rules, and this is the beauty, the people can decide what's acceptable and what's not thus the bots don't have to be part of the game.
It's not a vulnerable system, it has no central authority that can stop bad stuff happening, but the community can decide how to operate and flagging is the only way to stop bad stuff. When I say community, I refer to the whole blockchain as a community.
The flagging was meant for whatever the individual wants to use it for. We have plenty of low-quality posts in Trending that are just overvalued, bought most of their rewards and certainly deserve some flagging.
I don't think you're right; you can't just ignore the undesirable behavior, if you see bullshit, you have to call it out. Otherwise, if you ignore it, that person doesn't learn anything and just moves on with his life thinking he did the right thing.
I don't think that's the solution, far from it. Many people want to stay anonymous because it's a matter of privacy since it's a blockchain and everything you say stays here forever. In case something happens in the future, those people don't want to have their views linked to their identities here forever.
When I write "ignore" it shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. The usage of a strong word ("ignore") is to divert the reader as strongly as possible from "punishment". I do think that some gentle remark, for instance how to improve a post so it's not bullshit anymore, is more appropriate than simply "ignore". I try to do as much when some Aceh-based steemians come begging for upvotes :-)
Then about the anonymity: it's anyone's choice but someone who chooses to be himself basically makes an implicit pledge to all the other participants: "I choose to be myself, therefore I pledge not to behave like a d*ck or a moron in order to never be ashamed of myself in the future".
One can easily imagine the reverse from someone who choose, on the contrary, to be anonymous: "I wanted to stay anonymous because I want to keep the option open of someday behaving like a complete d*ck with impunity". Maybe that was not the motivation of someone in particular but those interacting with anonymous characters have, by definition, no way to tell beforehand !
The problem with this is that some people are harmed when information sources are targeted for retribution. Anonymity is necessary for some truths to be revealed. Anonymity can be abused for the annoying of others, but is existentially important for certain content to be available.
That availability is vastly more critical than preventing trolls. Simply having a rewards mechanism almost eliminates trolling on Steemit. Losing anonymity might cost lives, or will preclude sensitive content from surfacing on Steemit because of the danger of source targeting.
Particularly as censorship and laws restricting free speech proliferate, anonymity becomes ever more important.
I also fail to see that verified identity will impact content quality, trending, or rewards pool mining substantially.
I don't follow your reasoning but maybe we live in different contexts and have different backgrounds. "Information sources targeted for retribution" ? I would be curious if you had a concrete example maybe ? Like what, someone sending a hitman to your house because of what you wrote on Steemit ? Wow. I wouldn't want to live in your neighbourhood if that is something that looks likely in your context ...
"Losing anonymity might cost lives" ? Wow, really ? Are we talking about Caracas here ?
Censorship and laws restricting free speech proliferate ... for no reason ? Or do you choose to only look at the empty half of the glass ?
The relationship between verified identity and content quality is, to my mind, as follows: if I put effort in my post and craft a good post I am proud of and this post is appreciated by readers then their appreciation will be linked to my real-life person. Because this reputation is on the blockchain, I can take it anywhere with me, it accrues in time. If I was the first in 2018 to write a seminal article about the future of society under crypto as my verified-self I can boast about it even 20 years later when my prediction comes true and then bask in the glory of my realized prediction. So I have a strong incentive to try to write good articles where I display my knowledge, my ability to analyze facts and make sound predictions, etc. All these turn into unique assets associated to my real-life person, assets that I can leverage later.
If instead I am using, say, @regaemuffin as screen name and some fan art as profile picture I have no incentive to take myself seriously and write thoughtful articles because those require effort and who cares.
As I try to explain, including in this post trending and reward pool mining need first to be tackled correctly by Steemit in the next HF. Once that is implemented correctly, then verified identity should discourage people from abusing in a too obvious manner, as negative reputation would be associated with their real-life persona.
So, verified identity will solve Steemit's problems by enabling braggarts to boast. Neither that nor the inuring of a bad reputation will impact the problems addressed in this post at all.
It's a straw man.
I doubt you could point to posts I have made that I didn't take seriously. No cat memes here.
Apparently the fates of Eric Snowden, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning are unfamiliar to you. Since I have had my head pounded into concrete, against holding cell steel benches while cuffed, been mocked by cops, prosecutors, and judges, while vainly fighting for my rights, I assure you that there is good reason to not say certain things as your verified self.
Unless you like that kind of thing. Some do.
I don't.
Thank you for your answer.
I'll try to convey the nuance once more, I think there's still a chance I didn't make myself clear: once the self-voting and the voting bots are disabled in code then having a one-to-one relationship between real-life people and steemit accounts will greatly help in diminishing the level of abuse because of "portable reputation". Participants will be incentivized to behave responsibly (yes, you may call that "self-censoring") and disincentivized to blatantly mine the reward pool.
It might not solve completly the issues addressed in the post but it will have a markedly positive impact. Of course that's my opinion and absent a testing ground I can't prove anything.
The fates of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning are irrelevant here. A straw man, as you'd call it. I am an investor in Steem because I believe and care about the whole idea, the success of (my vision of) Steemit and also, reasonably enough, about my investment. As a "stakeholder", my opinion is that I do not care about Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. They do not feature anywhere in my vision for Steemit. I do not dream of Steemit becoming the über-whistleblowing site and take over from Wikileaks. I'm not sure that's how it's been positioned by Steemit Inc. either.
Snowden, Assange and Manning and others that want to do what they did (not judging what they did in any way) can keep leaking where they were leaking before. I have zero ambition for Steemit to become the site that hosts Donaldleaks or Xileaks or whatever. I vastly prefer Steemit to become a "virtual country" of creative communities, not a crypto-Wikileaks.
I'm expressing that, the whales might or might not agree. Basically what i'm saying is that "freedom of expression" is only dangerous when the expression itself is harmful to someone. I would prefer to avoid expressions that are "harmful to someone" on Steemit because that tends to get in the way of building harmonious communities. Somehow, calling someone openly a douchebag, whether you're right are wrong, tends to get in the way of building strong social relationship and poison the atmosphere for everyone: even observers will feel the impulse to take sides : "What do you think, is he a douchebag or not? Whose side are you on?"
So yes, there is very good reason to not say certain things as your verified self. My point is that I'd rather not have those kind of things being said on Steemit at all, whether under a "verified self" or as "anonymous". Just go say those types of things someplace else, please, if you have to say them ! There's always Wikileaks or other places who have made their mission to host your "certain things that you'd rather not say under your verified self". Steemit wasn't built with that mission, as far as I know, so please do not hi-jack it.
There is no reason to expect this to occur, other than those I have already discussed. Wishing a thing would be is not reason for it to be.
If you want a community to be able to speak freely, then you must accede to the reality that some people will speak about crimes and corruption that impacts them. Those things are harm. People are concerned about them when they are impacted by them. They will need to speak about them.
That I did so was why my head was beaten into the sidewalk. I harmed no one. I was being harmed, and challenged it. This is exactly what the whistleblowers did, and what is no longer possible on most platforms, and why Steemit is attracting many users today.
You utterly fail to acknowledge that harm is being done and that the bad actors that do this harm seek to conceal their participation in it, and that can only be revealed where there is freedom of speech.
Either Steemit permits freedom of speech, or it becomes NOTHING but a tool of repression, which I, and many, many others, will eschew. There goes your investment.
Your contention that only expression that harms is censored is utterly vapid, insipid, and not only without value, but is itself a harm to free people. It's equivalent to calling a gag on a rape victim necessary to prevent the rape victim from harming the rapist by calling for help.
That's not an exaggeration at all. It's what you advocate in your vision for Steemit.
Test: You got a 40.00% upvote from @jga courtesy of @fukako!
Hi Juliàn, are you on discord by any chance ? May I contact you somewhere ? Thanks
Yes, contact me on discord: jga#0699
Regards.
Can't find you. I don't know Discord but could it be that we don't share any "discord server" maybe ? My discord user is @sorin.cristescu#6999, can you find me ?
This is not so.
Code is law. Software is little more than rules.
This is a difficult one, I agree that bots are kind of a plague in the steem ecosystem and it can really go sideways as we progress.
However, I also agree that some solutions can be worse than the disease. It will take a lot of finesse in dealing with this, and out of the box thinking.
The idea is that forces that counter themselves will result in a lot of power being used for this conflict, while forces that complement themselves build on each other and take us further. Sorry, but this subject is one for which I have no practical proposal yet. Maybe the communities should take a moral stance at least and communicate to the users that bit-bot-ing is shitty behavior that might lead to exclusion from certain groups, but this can also go sideways really quick.
In my opinion bot voting and multiple accounts shouldn't be allowed.
"One person, one account". The blockchain is powerful because it can mediate and allow real people to find consensus and built trust. If you allow fake accounts then it's all useless and we are back to FB and the rest.
How that can be implemented, I don't know.
But for as long as bots are allowed and the Steem whitepaper says, black on white "Eliminating "abuse" is not possible and shouldn't be the goal." (page 15. I disagree, but who am I?) then downvoting people because they have used the system as designed is destructive and harmful
Yep, bit-bots might be to cost of uncensorability. Personally, I would prefer a level of abuse rather than censorship or the need for identity.
But the fact we are having these discusions is the way to aproach this problem :)
Why not? If someone manages two different accounts differently, you can relate to either identity per their behaviour. If they simply have multiple accounts they manage with the same behaviour, why would you treat either account differently?
What difference does it make who is the actual meatbag behind the behaviour?
Well, the root being discussed is botvotes for profit. Thus decreasing the profitability of the botvotes by flagging is directly getting to the root of the problem.
How would that impact buying botvotes, selfvoting, or circlejerks?
I can easily see how it could prevent people from speaking forthrightly. I do not see that as a benefit.