Symbiont{s} | A Small Revisit to the Abuse Dilemma

Greetings,

In a discussion with key members of the Steem community, we mentioned that when it comes to discussing fighting abuse on Steem, we are basically cycling in time loops considering that new users who are not aware of the history of Steem tend to propose ideas that were already suggested before. Which we actually consider as a good thing because it can be considered as a proxy indicator that the community converges toward the same path. As a summarization of the efforts done by the Symbionts team on solving and discussing the abuse issue, check the links below (we highly suggest anyone who is interested in our past approach to deal with the abuse issue to check them):

1- Symbiont{s} | Anti-Abuse Initiative | Steem Sentinels
2- Symbiont{s} | Steem Sentinels | Update [26-04-2020]
3- Symbiont{s} | Discussing the Abuse Dilemma
4- Symbiont{s} | Steem Sentinels | Rewards Regulation Tool
5- Symbiont{s} | Steem Sentinels | Anti-phishing Initiative
6- Symbiont{s} | Sentinels | Project Discontinued

Main related projects:

1- Steem Sentinels:: A project that we updated and maintained before it was discontinued. The project was based on the antiabuse project that was funded by the DAO before. You can find it here.
2- Sentinels: A project that we funded to deal with phishing, farming, cybercrime, and abuse on the Steem Blockchain. The project is open source under GPL3.

Why we are speaking about this?

Yes, speaking about the same thing, again and again, is not really that reinvigorating nor exciting. But any witness nonetheless has to partake in the current relevant discussions about the chain and its economy. In the past few days, several members of the community have shared their opinions on the issue and provided some suggestions to deal with the problem, you can check the posts from here:

1- It's time to fight with plagiarism again by @papi.mati
2- Fighting Abuse on Steem by @stef1

While those 2 posts do not exactly deal with the most infinitesimal technical intricacy of abuse and how to stop it. It is, however, an overall consolidation of a shared sentiment that we deeply agree on. But even though the focus was more on the plagiarism issue, There is another serious bigger issue which is farming. If plagiarists know what they are doing, they can easily generate posts from 3 level languages that can never be detected as plagiarism, in addition to that, there are free AI tools online right now that can generate text at will. Farming on the other hand is more direct and the people involved in doing it do not wait for people to vote for them nor fear anything.

The witness @starlord28 has shared his concern a few days ago about how some accounts are actually in a farm and dump cycle. To mention a few, accounts like @jasonshlck, @monsters, @ichiban, @haejin are farming blatantly and openly without any fear. An exorbitant amount of STEEM is being dumped every week, which is causing more selling pressure. Even though the general community can directly engage in the reward regulation process through negative voting, we know from experience that users, in general, are not too keen to do it and risk retaliation.

The cemetery worker paradigm

The cemetery worker paradigm describes the idea that the person who creates tombstones and digs graves for a living is in an existential paradigm situation, at the end of his day he does not know if he should either wish for more people to die to get more income or for the opposite thing. We believe that no one should be subjected to such a dilemma, hence why our opinion concords with what the witness @steemchiller suggested regarding funding the efforts to fight abuse directly from the DAO (operative costs). If we are going to reward people who undertake the heavy task of fighting abuse on Steem by upvotes and case by case. Then we should definitely accept and expect the eventuality that x people will simply create fake abuse cases to be rewarded because, for the most part, the willingness for gain as a necessity tends to outrank accountability for people in need, It is a modal that was tested, and we know now that it does not work. In addition, we should not turn fighting abuse into a mercenary business. There is indeed an extrajudicial punishment aspect on Steem that is powered by the negative voting ability, but if not based on a solid ethical and professional foundation, we will face a delicate quagmire situation that will make dealing with malign actors a very difficult task to do if not impossible.

The Steam community is full of talented individuals who we are sure can do great things. But when it comes to tackling abuse, the only big metric that really matters is the stack. This does not mean that POs and community owners can not play a major role in dealing with manageable issues such as plagiarism, it is just that large operations require large interventions, and considering that the stack on Steem isn't distributed enough and some of the whale themselves are involved in the farming, a lot of members of the community feel that they are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Just another small entry in the annals of Steem History,

Steem on!

The Symbionts Team,