The Problem

Panic Voting

In a post made by @calamus056 earlier today, he highlighted a few of the problems emerging as the Steemit community continues to grow. The main problem he pointed out was that the ratio of views to votes is higher than 1, meaning that

many curators have voted on the post without viewing the actual content.

This is a very dangerous game.

He claimed that the problem lies within the Steemit code, the fact that there is no algorithm to protect against this sort of behavior is the reason why this activity persists. But I think there is another problem that @calamus056 mentioned, but grossly overlooked.

The social aspect behind these votes, an activity that the author coined “Panic Voting,” is a HUGE part of the problem. People are incentivised to support other people’s content with upvotes, resteems, and positive replies. There is no incentive to speak a truth that critiques a creator or creates controversy, because the user would end up in exile from the Steemit community.

The only viable way to survive on this platform is to play nice.

(Of course, those with a little bit of money can buy influence, but I’ll talk about that in another article.)

Solutions?

I COMPLETELY agree with the author, we need to see an implementation to the platform that limits curation, making it so that users cannot curate right away, and that

the amount of time that curators aren’t allowed to curate should be based on the amount of data (text and pictures) in the post.

Furthermore, I think that Steemit should harbor an environment that accepts genuinely nice comments, as well as promoting constructive comments and critiques that benefit the creator of that content.

Thank you so much for reading.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow me for updates @kava and let me know what you think.

Thanks again,

@kava