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RE: Steem 19.10 Officially Released: AppBase, RocksDB, Unlimited Content Editing, and More!

in #steem6 years ago

The release will include a change to allow unlimited content editing (beyond seven days)!

I cannot support this change. Of course it sounds good, everyone can edit his / her post at any time he / she wants, if you made something wrong you can always correct it.

But it is also inviting phishing to Steemit. Most of us would never think about this. Phishing is not a big topic on Steemit but still it creates huge damage.

Phishing means that an account publishes posts and / or comments including links to extern sites. These extern sites pretend to be some serious service or a steemit.com fake and ask you to insert your keys. Steemit users lost through Phishing tokens worth several thousand of US dollars.

In the moment steemcleaners combats phishing by flagging the account posting phishing links to a reputation of zero or below. Thanks to this all posts / comments without payout are hidden.
Additionally @guard replies to the post under which the phishing account has posted with a warning. Also @arcange runs with his account a bot posting warning comments.

This change could make a big impact on the phishing business. You can only flag a post if it is before payout. So it is also just possible to hide a post with a flag before payout or with a flag on another post crushing the reputation.
So if an account edits a phishing link into a post past payout the only possibility to hide this post would be a flag on a new post which is before payout. If the account doesn't post anymore there is nothing you can do.

With all the positive effects this change brings we should not forget that this change makes phishing much easier because it makes it harder to combat it.

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You can upvote after payout, why not allow flagging as well? Is there some game theoretic reason behind that decision?

You can click both upvote and flag past payout but it has no effect. You will not loose any Voting Power and the payout amount won't change. Only posts with negative rshares (negative payout) are hidden on Steemit and as you cannot change the payout afterwards there is no way to hide it afterwards.

This is something to look out for, indeed. I'm sure the Steem team will have a workaround.