What flags really are
View this post on Hive: What flags really are
6 years ago in #steem by themarkymark (78)
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Great explanation! I was thinking about writing something like this and now I don't have to. (Maybe I still will... we have overlapping audience but maybe I will attract some readers that miss yours.)
This has happened to us at SBI, actually. In most cases it was because somebody didn't understand how curation works - "Your upvotes are 'stealing' my curation rewards".
In some cases it's because people somehow believe that a 100% voluntary self/crowdfunded upvote subscription is somehow 'socialist' and don't want any support from it.
And in some cases, it was because they thought others deserve it more.
Come to think of it I have seen that as well. Especially the bots that go around giving $0.000 votes to leach curation rewards.
Quick question: What is this animalcontrol shite giving you hundreds of upvotes? Maybe you have a post on it?
Animalcontrol is fulltimegeek’s bot that spams 6,000-35,000 times a day and he upvotes with his 500K+ SP.
I assure you he doesn’t give me upvotes. In fact he has been flagging all my comments and posts for the last 3-4 months because I blacklisted his spam account @proboards.
I don’t see where you see upvotes because all he does is spam and upvote it.
I have two posts a few months back that go into detail. Look for the ones with the baby as a thumbnail image.
It's sad to see this sort of spiteful behaviour on Steem and it does a lot to put off new users. There are certain people who do some good stuff, but I find it hard to support them when they also attack others. Even safer when these attacks are used as an excuse to take even more rewards.
You know I've done my share of flagging and had retaliation for it. That's the risk I accepted. One issue is that most people are scared to flag certain accounts as they know they could lose their own rewards by doing so. I had wondered if there could be done way to flag anonymously. There was a previous effort where people delegated to a bit that flagged a certain abuser.
Steem is far from perfect, but I still see potential. Those with the power have to decide if they want it to have a future.
Yeah, I remember that. Wasn't sure it was owned by him as well. So he's upvoting his own spam, so classy. I misspoke when I said he was upvoting you.
And there are people left here that still think he's justified in doing this? Wasn't this over 60 steem or something? Insane. This would be in the dictionary next to 'shitting where you eat'.
https://steemit.com/@animalcontrol/comments
You can read the entire story in these two posts:
https://steemit.com/drama/@themarkymark/get-your-popcorn-ready
https://steemit.com/fulltimegeek/@themarkymark/fulltimegeek-tips-over-grandma-s-crossing-the-street-and-steals-candy-from-babies
I have struggled to find clear guidelines as to what is an acceptable flag or not and this is a good explanation.
However for new users things need to be a bit clearer than: "for the good of the platform".
New users with significant online followings often repost their content to Steem as a way to get started and then get flagged for plagarism. @steemcleaners method of dealing with this situation is less than ideal, especially when these users have often been censored on the very platforms steemcleaners is using to verify identity.
The precise expectations for referencing sources is also not clear. If you link to an image (rather than copy it) do you need to explicitly reference as well given the reference is in the link?
Is is acceptable to downvote just because you disagree with the content? - I had thought not, but some people do it.
There is no guideline.
People will literally flag you on here because they didn't like your face. Or flag you because they are in an alcoholic rage. The list is endless.
I, for one, preserve the flag for when I see things that may be illegal, spam, plagiarism, lies or scams.
Cheetah/SteemCleaners will comment a few times before flagging for duplicate content giving plenty of time to verify with them that the duplicate content is your own site. Cheetah has one job and it's very narrow, find duplicate content.
As for flagging because you disagree, while I feel you are free to use your stake as you choose, but if you say you like blue and I like black I don't feel that's a good reason to flag. If you said you liked blue and voted it for $100 and I disagreed the reward pool should be used in that fashion to that extent, I'd be comfortable flagging it.
I'm constantly amazed at how many people see a flag as "stealing".
How would you address the bullying that goes on between certain accounts using their steempower to settle personal differences? That is steempower that could be used otherwise to enrich the community. Also there are some accounts with so much steempower that only a fool would flag their content no matter what they posted. They could obliterate you in return. Wouldn't it serve steem and steemit better to empower more bonafide curators and then let the cards lie where they lie? Or to agree on a hardfork that resulted in a more equitable distribution of rewards. We must work a balance to encourage newbies but not chase the whales away. I appreciate flagging in its effectiveness dealing with trolls and spam. I really do. But the infighting it fosters does nothing to help our reputation and encourage more investors, be they investing blogs, time, or money. Growing our presence should take first priority. Everyone wins in that scenario.
I am not a fan of emotional flags. As I said above I believe my flags are for the good of the platform and I use that as a metric when I flag. There are so many people I would love to flag but I practice restraint.
Ideally good curators should be able to effectively distribute rewards but unfortunately it’s hard to put enough Steem Power in their hands as it means someone will lose a lot of potential rewards to make that happen and with the current state of affairs few what to do that.
If you were any more full of shit the USA would have to label you "organic fertilizer"!
There is the rub but probably also the best way forward. I appreciate your response:) Thank you:)
If someone has a lot of SP, then he keeps flagging users' posts and also upvoting himself, is he going to get all the rewards from the pool?
No. The pool is huge and no one has that amount of influence.
Just an assumption. If there is someone that powerful, would he get more rewards?
Based on the formula:
if Recent Claims decreased, there will be more Psteem.
In most extreme case, if RS=RC, Psteem = RB. One person will get all the rewards.
Yes, if a group controlled 51% of the SP they could theoretically use 49% of their stake to flag everyone to zero and take 100% of all inflation created with the remaining 2% vote.
They could also choose every witness at that point. This is what a 51% attack would look like on any Proof-of-stake coin, yet there is no incentive to take these actions because attacking a platform that you own is foolish. Everyone would just power down and cash out or (more likely) fork the attacker off the platform.
The logistics of owning that much stake are impossible. The only entity even close to owning that much is Steemit Inc, and as we all know they are putting downward pressure on the market, not buying back their own coin.
Thanks for your explanation. Make sense to me now.
Very well said. We seriously need more education on the use of downvotes and what they actually mean. “Unjustified” downvotes and how to respond included.
I agree with whatsup, it seems many are also confusing the current discussion. A UI change has nothing to do with what downvotes do or how they work, just how they are displayed on the front end 🙂
I say we need more brightly colored, flashing, informative pop ups 😜
I would happily accept a flag if I deserved it for plagiarism.. or even if someone thinks my opinion is shit... or because they don't like my potty mouth. But getting flagged just because one person is mad at another person is bullshit.
Funny that this was the first hit on Google for "show me on the doll meme".🚩
I'm pro-flag and the flag will ALWAYS have a place in my heart no matter what StInc and the community decide.
Too many assholes want to use the flags for the wrong reasons (not curative) and believe this has translated into the fuzzy age of flagging we have entered.
I miss the golden age of flagging but @ngc and @fulltimegeek both fucked that up in my opinion in their dick measuring contest. We used to work together to flag abuse back in the day.
Now it's all people ego flexing. Fuck ego. Let's focus on shit that matters. Think we need to flag for percieved quality of work and not based on opinion / ideology.
The prevalence of the former merely demonstrates an insecurity in ones own worldview. Hell, I welcome ANYBODY to take a stab at my theism. Talk shit about Jesus. Am I gonna flag it? Hell no.
A wise person refutes the argument. They don't use force to hide it. That's just my 0.02 SBD.
Posted using Partiko Android
I still think their flagging lowers rewards for minnows because the share of the whole their rshares represents is lowered by increasing the pool of voted rshares.
It's a ploy to keep rewards at the top, imo.
I'm not sure I follow. Who are you referring to when you say "...their flagging...", @ngc and @fulltimegeek?
I'm also fuzzy on the represented rshares vs voted rshares you mention. Care to elaborate?
Whenever a whale votes, up or down, everybody else loses money.
It's just a fact of the math.
"It's just a fact of the math."
I wish I knew more of the math.
Steem really does have a pretty complicated system, or at least it seems so to me. With some 5 different currencies, a few transferable, others kinda-sorta transferable, others not transferable and all with different issuance schedules, scarcities and value you have to manage on top of the whole social task it gets to be a lot of moving parts.
There's still a lot I haven't quite wrapped my mind around yet. One of them is 'voting power'. I've wanted to put bars in my UI for RC and voting power, and a I did add one for RC already. Resource Credits was fairly straight forward, I found the max and current levels and it worked out nicely. I can't find anything on the backend that talks about voting power by that name, and I don't really get how it relates to rshares or how it works with different vote weights. Some UIs show a bar for both though, so I'm sure it's nothing too terribly arcane.
Complicated can be okay though. Space telescopes are pretty complicated, and they work quite well to my appraisal.
Take a look at what @aggroed put out about his newest bot, it will show you the various things that can be changed on the blockchain.
I wish I was set up to learn the math better, too.
Flying by the seat of my pants leads to errors, but not always.
Most of what I know I got from older hands back when they cared.
The memory hole is eating away at them.
That was from before I knew the difference between steem and Steemit,...
Good one Marky and as part of the current conversation we are going to have to explain that the UI is different than the blockchain rules and simply a way to display what the blockchain does.
I downvoted someone the other day. I promised to do it worse if he wouldn't stop complaining. 6 or 7 messages over 4.5 cents. I originally intended to remove it if he responded in a normal fashion, but seconds after I gave the downvote he whined about it on one of my other posts before I could tell him why I did it. I almost paid for a bot to really punish him. He has been creating and upvoting very low quality stuff consistently for months, while saying he was busy and only doing it for days. He isn't the worst but he adds almost no value to the chain and messes with other people's bids because he cannot calculate how to do it. The most ironic part was his stupid bid cost him more than my down vote.