RE: The Heck is going on with Steem?
Totally agree that the bidbots are a cancer that shouldn't be allowed. But the rot started with the very design of the platform, see page 15 of the Steem Whitepaper: "Eliminating "abuse" is not possible and shouldn't be the goal."
This is the very moment when the rot started spreading.
Yes, totally eliminating abuse is not possible but it must always be the goal.
Abuse should be fought BY THE PLATFORM, through the way it's implemented. Not by "vigilante" action. The police of a state have a role, if you allow "vigilante" and "mob" actions you get ... the US and its rate of gun violence that is tens of times above any other civilized country.
I believe your proposal is even more misguided than that fateful phrase of the whitepaper. I believe you are fatally wrong when you write "If people start flagging more, everybody else wins."
If people start flagging there will be the equivalent of civil war on the platform. The flagged will start organizing and fighting back - you have the illustration with grumpycat and "the resistance".
The whole platform will be consumed by destructive flagging wars. Instead of building communities we'll just try to run for safety and take sides with either the vigilante mob that dictates what's "shitpost" and what's not OR "the resistance".
Unlike a physical country where people actually have to fight because fleeing is not always possible, this will lead to a MASSIVE bleeding of the platform and possibly its death.
(c) @lishu
Let's stay positive. Reward good posts, encourage those writing shitposts to improve, gently admonish them if they don't but reserve flagging only for the steemit equivalents of "criminals" - those who post phishing links, scams, really serious abuse.
In the medium-long term, I hope the platform will enforce a 1 : 1 relationship between your steemit account and the real you. Because if on Steemit you are the real you, there's a whole corpus of research showing that you'll behave more responsibly because your real self only has one reputation - hard to build, easy to tarnish.
People controlling several accounts are only one second away from doing something reprehensible because no one can trace the misbehaving account to them and they can always "dump" a compromised account.
I can see why someone prizing anonymity might be strongly against this idea but well, that's my opinion ...
(self-upvoted for visibility; I hate self-upvoting but since sorting is broken I see no other way)
I have to say, this is probably one of the most disheartening posts I've read in a long time with regard to Steem. That is some 15 year old just discovering Ayn Rand level shitty logic. If that's the logic guiding this place then I have my doubts for the future of this place.
Sorry not sure what you are referring to, could you please be a bit clearer? What exactly is comparable to "Ayn Rand level shitty logic" ?
Sorry, I hope you don't think I meant you (your post was rather enlightening).
The excerpt from the white paper you highlighted is just dumbfounding. Essentially chaotic neutral thinking at its worst. It basically says they don't care about the quality of actions here, so long as there are actions to drive the chain. It seems to say as long as your means of generating rewards for yourself don't break the mostly non-existant rules, then all methods are acceptable.
I get they want to be decentralized and uncensored and let the "market" decide what is valuable and not valuable content. However they have completely underestimated most people's desire for short-term profiteering and rent-seeking. There's a small but sizable portion of people here who are trying to create and grow something of value here, and a host of others in it just to get paid as much as possible in as short a time as they can. Unfortuntely the latter group is going to burn whatever real value the first group creates.
Spot on.
I can't believe you work in a helpdesk, Pang Tong ! The Liu Beis of this world don't know what they are missing !
That's unfettered Capitalism for you!