RE: Steemit for the Future: The Fine Line Between Responsible Curation and Freedom of Speech
Really well written and balanced article.
I agree with most of the comments, but I would like to throw an alternative into the mix. Instead of trying to stop the content, the spammers, the one liners, is there any way we could filter out that content?
Maybe not the full solution but part of the solution. The reason I would propose this is as steemit grows and content become more diverse we will get stuff that looks like spam if you looking at it through the medium of a browser. If your here to look and read articles you may not want to see posts of pictures, recipes, travel posts etc. I am going to think some more about this, and maybe write a post about it but I am convinced that Steemit will look very different when we have a large group of users and it will be too hard to police with just downvotes. The influx of new users and methods of getting followers in the last week is a case in point.
You make a good point... I feel hopeful that the promised "Communities" feature (whenever it comes along) might address some of the issues of "filtering" content to where we're more likely to be able to only focus on what interests us. This would become an increasingly important part of the Steemit Interface as the number of users grow. Right now, it feels "manageable" with less than 200,000 users, but imagine the content flow with 20 million users! Definitely something to keep in mind...
Ideally, the Steemit Environment is "Self-regulating" as a product of the peer curation process. Quality contributions get rewarded; "empty" and "spun" content gets ignored and plagiarism gets downvoted. That's the ideal. I do spend a lot of time on this site, and on many days I read upwards of 100 posts. But not everyone does. And not everyone is here because they are a blogger, writer or into some other kind of creative expressionist. I have no doubts that the community will hit a certain point of "critical mass" where the serious curators here will not be able to keep up... time will tell how we work with that situation. But it's good to talk about these things before they arrive!