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RE: Time to start flagging the "trending" trash...

in #steem7 years ago (edited)

I have no problem whatsoever with negative opinions. The problem appears when you give everyone a gun and completely free license to use it in order to enforce their opinions.
Downvotes and flags should stay imo.. but they have to be defanged, deweaponized. Otherwise you achieve completely opposite effect from free exchange of opinions. Would you be as vocal with YOUR opinions if you knew that everyone knows where you live and if they chose to they can blow your brains out, with no liability whatsoever?
That's a great system for one thing only - total self censorship. Everyone posts only what is "safe" to everyone. In other words, inspirational quotes and pictures of cats. A social network which fosters this kind of community through its mechanics will not survive the upcoming realignment of the market.

Personally, I prefer systems which do not add up upvotes and downvotes but keep them separate. This creates a nice derived indicator of how "controversial" (in other words, interesting) a post is. In Steemit downvotes could be recorded, maybe even their steem value, but not deducted from the value of the post. Users could then filter to not see posts which have too many relative downvotes or are too controversial (difference between upvotes and downvotes). This would allow giving negative opinions through voting system without creating an ideal playground for actual cyber bullying. (No, I do not consider someone saying something nasty to me "bullying". But if someone directly and materially damages me just because he can then it is real, actual bullying. In their attempt to create a "self regulating" platform, steemit creators have actually constructed a bully's paradise, a place where I can BUY the power to take away your income and shut you up)

But all this is actually quite old discussion. Early MMOs went through exactly this phase almost 20 years ago with harsh death penalties in PvP and gear loss through death. They quite quickly realized where this is leading long term (hint: no, it's not prosperity and steady inflow of new players) and that's why almost no online games today feature this mechanic. As I said, under the hood all social networks are MMORPGs. Ignore the expensive lessons learned from decades of development and research in these games at your own peril.

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