Intro
Steemians long have been fighting against abuses. Although we have a useful tool the so called downvoting, it is tiring to monitoring all potential abusive cases and downvote them everyday. In this proposal, I suggest a new systemic design which can reduce negative impacts from abusing, especially reward exploits, while minimizing cognitive burdens on genuine users.
Current design
The current design of Steem against abuse is "decentralized moderation". All contents are located in a global pool where everyone can post and get rewarded. Also, everyone can moderate posts in the global poiol using upvote or downvote. So if there are any abusive behaviors like self-vote for rewards, users can downvote these posts and punish abusers.
However, this system has some problems. First, entrance costs is very low. This means, if an abuser got caught, he/she can create another account cheaply and do abuse again. Second, it requires continuous downvoting (moderation) if abusers keep doing. Therefore, reacting against abusive behaviors costs lot of attentions and voting power.
New system
In the new system, a new namespace "village" is added. To create a village, one should pay significant amount of fee in order to prevent village-squatting. Every posts should be included a village, and every village has at least one moderator (default is the owner).
Moderators of a village can whitelist or blacklist users. That means, if a user commits abusing, he/she can be blocked by mods to post in the village. Additionally, like witness votes, users can vote for village. But unlike witness vote, villages can be upvoted or downvoted. If a village has negative voting score, all posts in that village cannot be rewarded (i.e. rshares under that village is assumed as zero). Downvote on post is obsoleted and replaced by downvote on village, which is a group of posts managed by a set of mods.
In this figure, abusers posted in Village B, but due to negative score of the village, they cannot be rewarded. The abusers tried to post in Village A that has positive score, but they soon get expelled since the mods of Village A recognized they are abusers. The goal of mods will be managing the village socially desirable to attract more people by rewards. Users will have less cognitive burdens to cope with all abusive posts. Instead, they just need to vote once if they think a village is abuser's realm. There still can exist areas of "freedom of speech" but it doesn't always mean "freedom for reward".
In short,
- Users create villages
- Users post in villages
- Village mods moderate users (not posts)
- Users moderate villages instead of posts
Thanks for reading and looking forward to active discussions.
Great contribution to the discussion. Generally, I think having strong moderators in each community sub who work together cooperatively is preferable to having a global police force.
I agree. Global police force cannot know every contexts and situations of each community, especially as Steem is growing rapidly.
Could it be possible that the villages will be the geographical location of the poster?
No. It is just a namespace like subreddits
The communities, or villages, would be based upon common interests, so it would be possible to have one for a person's country or region, but that would be more as a matter of identity, so actual location of the users could be anywhere.
A sort of mayor in a small/huge community. Interesting
Wow! This is amazing. Like a small eco-system. And you hit the nail on the head with the word "Village". Well done!
This reminds me of humans who still live in tribes or villages - they are less likely to suffer from depression and overall the village has a lower crimerate than cities because noone is left alone. They support each other. In a city - many people live next to each other - but nobody knows anybody. Similar to Steemit - it's so big that abusers can do their thing.
And posts in the Sin City cannot be rewarded. Abusers at least should pretend to be good in normal cities.
Exactly what I just thought. I'm personally looking to manually curate good content in a specific genre on another account, but founding a friendly little village sounds like an even better proposition.
I've written about a dream I had regarding the corporate lifestyle. Is it funny-sad or sad-funny?
This is a good post and I am happy that you thought about a way to fight abuse.
From my understanding the concept of villages is similar to what Steemit.inc is working on, communities. Even though I am looking very much forward to the implementation of this I am not sure it can address the in my view most damaging abuse which are bot self upvotes.
Checking the content of either village or community still remains a manual task by humans and therefore has only minimal effect in fighting bot votes.
To effectively change this kind of abuse I think a code change to comment rewards is required that either
Communities are off chain but villages are on-chain that can influence rewards. Bot self voting can be addressed by 1) mods blacklist bots in the village, and 2) users downvote villages (so no reward) those mods allow bot self-voting.
Thank you for clarifying. The solution sounds good.
Hey @clayop that's an interesting proposal. I have one question and one observation -
Would abusers be given a chance to reform? Or abuser just be moved from "village" to village without ever having another chance to be rewarded for good behavior?
You have to take into consideration that there loads of articles online (some even here at Steemit) which 'teach' new users to essentially 'game' the system.
Chances are that many new users wont even know that they are doing anything wrong.
So would there be a chance for reform?
Lastly, I don't know that downvoting a village (rather than the individual) would be very fair to the residents. Furthermore, it may stifle free thought and expression. I don't really want my neighbors in the "village" becoming the #Thought-Police.
Just imagine if some the neighborhood starts posting about politics... somebody (or several people) is about to get kicked out of the village and labeled an abuser.
I commend you for your creative proposal but it may need some amount of amendment to make things more practical and to keep free thought alive here at Steemit.
Village is not a group of users but just a space to post (like a local market). An abuser in bad town can do good behaviors in a good village.
Hi @clayop thanks for replying and helping me understand a bit more regarding your proposal.
Thanks!
nonetheless, according to your proposal, it would seem that one abuser in the village could draw the 'sin city' flag, and no one in the village would be able to gain rewards.
That's like 51% attack. We surely have more stake held by good users than abusers.
The top two authors on Steemit are scammers, @mindhunter and @tamim. Your assumption is not proved.
Also, most of the Steem that exists was mined before Steemit even was created. Again, the assumption is invalid.
Who gets the $5k buyin when one enters a village?
IMO, your argument is less relevant to my statement.
And you might misunderstand. No-one pays for entering village. Fees are paid when villages are created.
So, when a village, composed of 100 Steemers who have each paid 5000 Steem, gets blacklisted, and those 100 people give up on the village, what happens to the 500,000 Steem they paid to join it when it disbands?
If one Steemer wants out, what happens to their 5k investment?
Users dont pay for the village fee. It is paid by the creator once and the village is opened to everyone.
Do you envision the creator of the village then having veto power over who to accept into the village? If not, no one will do it.
Whitelisting or blacklisting. It should be possible.
Hi @clayop, I has read and resteem your post, I'll be right back, thanks
I translate to indonesia :
Moderator sebuah desa dapat memasukkan daftar putih atau daftar hitam pengguna. Itu berarti, jika pengguna melakukan pelanggaran, dia dapat diblokir oleh mods untuk dikirim ke desa. Selain itu, seperti suara saksi, pengguna bisa memilih desa. Tapi tidak seperti suara saksi, desa bisa diunggulkan atau diturunkan. Jika sebuah desa memiliki nilai pemungutan suara negatif, semua pos di desa tersebut tidak dapat diberi imbalan (yaitu desa di desa tersebut dianggap nol). Downvote on post sudah usang dan digantikan oleh downvote di desa, yang merupakan kelompok posting yang dikelola oleh satu set mods.
Best regards
@mukhtar.juned
#indonesia
great project to support steemit and reduce abusive content welldone best of luck 4 the system
Great article! your idea can really help steemit become more friendly and free from abusers
Maybe the community feature announced in the 2017 Road Map could bring us similar functions. Thanks and good luck again!
Communities feature is off-chain so that it cannot influence rewards. This proposal is about on-chain consensus.
This is amazing idea. We still have to discuss how much one (or a group of people?) should pay for the village, or according to which standard we should devide villages, or how do we establish each village(by tag maybe? or other technical way?), etc. But I think this is a firm step toward the "spam-free, abusing-free Steemit." Thank you for the wonderful idea. :)
In my idea, one should pay quite lot as a fee (e.g. 5000 Steem).
I think this is too complicated.
And too expensive. I suspect that ~90+% of current Steemers couldn't join a village today. I couldn't.
You may misunderstand. Users can freely use any village unless they are blacklisted.
I would never plunk down $5k to create a village that just anyone could join, particularly if that new account could cause the entire village to lose the ability to earn rewards.
Very interesting idea. I think as it stands right now that Steemit is still going to leave things in the hands of the people to control and direct so downvoting is our only option for the time being. However I do think they will need to address these issues as Steemit grows or it will just implode on itself and self destruct into a common Porn and filth site along with every other scam and sin out there. There is a fine line and we as users need to address, report and downvote anything that doesn't fit in within the Steemit community. If people would come together on this more we could keep the Steemit community more in control by the users and not by Steemit.
Well thought out and explained. Not quite sure about the fee structure though. But thanks for sharing your ideas.
I have a question! When you say "self-vote for rewards"...what do you mean? Do you mean that check-mark next to "Upvote post" when we create post or you mean creating another account and voting for ourselves?
P.S. I'm new here..so still learning ^_^
That's normal but some people are abusing it, e.g. post random words and self-upvote tens of time per day.
Oh, I get it now! Thanks for explaining! :)
It sounds very interesting. Just got one question. How could a small village that is full of good people survive from any intentional attacks from larger dominating vilages or individuals? We have seen so many cases that some political issues made people bully some innocent minorities. Do you have a plan to prevent that happen systemically?
There is no "size" of village. It is like directories so anyone choose to post any village. Intentional attack is only valid when 51% stakes are held by evil users. If there is an intentional attack, also will be defensive upvote(on village) too.
Thanks. There is no size of village but size can make sense when it comes to the number of user posting to the village. So it is still not very clear to me that how this model prevents majority of people from downvoting the villeages created by minorities. Think about a village created for LGBT. How could they save their village from being downvoted by huge number of haters? What would happen if users of cn village downvote on kr village due to the political issus like THAAD installation? Maybe I am fundamentally misunderstnading your proposal.
It is matter of rewards, not of freedom of speech. And if there is more stakes supporting a certain village, poats in the village can get rewarded. Be advised that a village is not a group of people(and your misunderstanding maybe about this point). People can post everywhere until blacklisted.
ok, I am getting closer. still miles away though... :) thanks!
This is very educational @clayop. I am a newbie and been here 10 days learning. This post helps me to understand how this steemboat functions and has its oil. Upvoted you and followed.
Thank you very much for your witness vote! I am voting for your witness also!
I like your system to collaborate in managing abuse because it would be a big improvement over what we have. Thank you for saying it is on blockchain in another comment reply instead of off because this is what I wanted to know after reading!
Thanks!
@clayop This is a very good idea! We 100% have to do something about the abuse here. And instead of just complaining you came up with a great way to help fight it!
I am a witness that supports the Minnow Support Project, and over there in discord we just came up with a new channel to put abusers into, where once in there they can make their plea to be let back into general channel.. It's a step in the right direction to stop scams and abuse on Steemit
SMART !
this solves nothing.
you are starting with a very specific problem -- abusers with a lot of steem power getting paid a lot of money for very low quality content. if you stick them all in villiages together, the bad villiages will be gettiung the same upvotes the bad users currently get.
The solution is what it has always been: people with enough sense to know better downvote shitty content. Its really as simple as that. And it will either work or it won't. And there's not really anyway to subsititue anything else for that.
I might made unclear explanations, but you need to pay attention to mods. Mods have moderation power that can remove abusers from the village and it's an one-time event. If some mods are allowing abusers, then users downvote the mods(village) due to disagreement on the mods' policy. This is an one-time event, similar to witness vote. Surely users can upvote villages to support and protect villages from abusive downvotes.
"Mods have moderation power that can remove abusers from the village"
so how will being removed from a villiage effect the abuser. How will it stop him from abuse. He can just post in another villiage , or create his own. Or, more likely, join in a villiage in the first place that he knows will tolerate abuse.
AORN, most of the poeple with a lot of SP aren't even willing to downvote individual abusersl. In fact many of them are participating in the abuse, supporting the abuse, or selling their vote to someone who does one or the other.
Adding collateral damage (that is to say, making it so their downvote hurts the payouts of innocent villiage posters as well as the abusers) to the equation isn't going to make them more willing to do so. In fact, it I suspect it will make them less so.
What a system like this would do is make sure that you had to be a member of a lucrative village in order to get significant payouts. And the most lucrative villages are going to be the ones supported by the same whales who support these self upvoting schemes in the first place.
What is comes down to is precisely what i said before. Right now the problem is that some whales flat out support abuse, and others do nothing, but very few are fighting it.
the same whales that now support abuse will continue to do so regardless of what 'villiage' it occurs in.
the same whales who elect to do nothing now to combat abusive individuals will continue to do nothing to combat abusive villages.
the real effects something like this would have are:
There will be well-managed villages using whitelist and blacklist. They still can be rewarded.