STEEM - Another Police State?

Let us change the culture so we don't "nuke" small accounts to oblivion for whatever reason, we need to be better at retaining users and showing them the right path!

Management-Empowerment-David-Sorin-Culture-Change.jpg

SteemCleaners, Cheetah, Walden, Toiletscrubbers, Curie, Trails, VoteGuilds, looking for users making some mistakes with puffy red skin and eyes full of revenge and wild west. Instead of rehabilitating users and work with us on user retention, we hear and see that much of the power delegated has been abused by the very same users who have been entrusted with this SteemPower.

@Fyrstikken and Everyone else for the most part - I am saying Me and YOU are not doing the best jobs, and we should take a break and come up with new solutions that help retain users instead of bomb flagging people for driving 60 in zone 50. I know it is easy to let emotions take over sometimes, we cannot afford this stupidity to continue and a cultural change must happen!.

There are so many things you can do to earn active and/or passive income on the STEEM blockchain, allow me to list just a few alternatives to broaden your horizon:

  • Blogging/streaming/vlogging for rewards
  • Curation/trailing/frontrunning bidbots for rewards
  • Run a Witness/Mining/Block validating for rewards
  • Renting out SteemPower for a fee/kickback
  • Selling upvotes for a fee/kickback
  • Selling witness-votes for a fee/kickback
  • Promoting products/selling ad space on your blog posts for a fee/long-term earnings.
  • Earning inflation on your SteemPower

The only real value in any business or blockchain are the customers/users - and when we all start from today with the goal of having the highest user retention possible, it will make us stronger and much more diversified when it comes to content. I have heard even in my own community discrimination against other ethnic groups because of their lack of professionalism or new to the Internet maybe? Allow for disagreements without making everything a battle about life or death.

You can find me and other whales at http://STEEMspeak.com 24/7 all year. We are an investor/user oriented no bullshit forum with an ever active voice chat. Our main interest is to contribute making STEEM the best experience for most people, and instead of coding a new system (that will be gamed anyway), this is a call for CULTURE-CHANGE on STEEM, giving people information, 2nd chances, being more helpful and informative before using weaponized flags of certain account death.

I do not want to remove the FLAG from STEEM, but I see the need for a better FLAG-CULTURE on the platform. Like with gun-laws, you have the right to carry, but not the right to aim and shoot everything and everyone you feel hate and emotional against just because you can.

Thank you for reading, I am looking forward to read your comments and reply to some of them. If you vote for witnesses, please drop a vote for @fyrst-witness and if you like to talk, come to @steemspeak whenever you want.

Tnx
Fyrst.

Sort:  

I agree, some change must be made, a lot of times the people committing these mistakes and breaking the rules are new users, maybe instead of flagging on the first time, a strike system could be used, instead of nuking the account to -1 rep for the first bad post and provide a rehabilitation system? maybe when delivering the warnings also leaving them a link to the site rules and the community consensus on plagiarism and copy/pasting instead of flagging them and not telling them why?

Flags don't need to go away, they just need to be used properly.

Flags don't need to go away, they just need to be used properly.

Right on target!

A cultural change must be born into STEEM, CULTURAL.

@fyrstikken, I can’t forget your constant support back in the days when I was just a beginner, and when I was wondering if it’s worth staying at Steemit because I was under attack of some mad flagging trolls. I do completely support your appeal for a better FLAG-CULTURE on the platform. But I didn’t ever noticed SteemCleaners, Cheetah or Curie have ever abused their voting power. Have I understand something wrong?

I also have tried to start a discussion about solving the “mad flagging problem”, but it has finished with a disappointing conclusion that we have to live with “aberrations”, and wait for them to collide with someone who has more power…

I agree with you that we should be more judicious with the use of flags. If I flag people in these situations I use a very low power flag, and more commonly just explain how they are breaking Steemit etiquette.

Just wanted to say Curie doesn't engage in any kind of flagging. On the contrary, Curie rewards authors, supports building communities and has had a massive impact on user retention. Curie has never been and never will be any kind of power play organization. Curie's mission is to serve Steem. Curie encourages quality content creation, user engagement, and quality curation and never asks anything in return from its beneficiaries.

Vote for this comment if you disagree :)

I'm still seeing too much spam rather than too much flagging. A new user that followed basic ethics and general etiquette would avoid posting the type of spam that's often generously ascribed to ignorance, like leaving meaningless comments everywhere, asking for upvotes and follows.

There are many spammers who will not take advice and so flagging is a way to hide what they do. Some will say we can mute them, but this flagging helps everyone. I do hate seeing flagging used as a weapon to attack critics. I've had that happen to me. I would hope whales can act for the good of the platform. They benefit in the long run

User retention will continue to be an issue due to many factors. The use of flags is of course one but the trending page must change from a pay to play home page to one where people actually see that good content can get rewarded also. (Edit- misspelled Good)

But then you have the issue of what 'good" content is. I've written about this several times on my own profile; the word "good" is so subjective in this context. No one will win if this method of rewards keeps up.

Let us first decide if the bibbot ruled home page is what we want people to see when they first enter Steem/ steemit. Subjectively it is not the best the site has to offer. I would propose it become the promoted page and a new trending page being created based on posts curated by one of the manys teams like @curie.

Let us first decide if the bibbot ruled home page is what we want people to see

This post is about FLAGPOWER ABUSE, if you want I can flag your last 5 posts or reduce your reputation 57 to reputation -4 if you would like a demonstration.

And it does not matter if I am a Bidbot or if my owners take their delegation back and use it to circle-upvote their "friends only" or sell the votes on the black market directly for Bitcoins instead. So cut it out, bidbots are not an issue as people delegate maybe 30-90% of their powers to bidbots, there are still genuine rewards from visible real users.

STEEM will never become a welfare system with a basic income. This is a very competitive blockchain, Proof of Brain & Investor/Business friendly

Sincerely,
@Booster
The first and Original BidBot on STEEM
Download my source code from Github.

I stand corrected, Pardon my tangential conversation.

@booster is right. There is nothing wrong with using some bots, but it's when the bots are overused that it becomes a problem. That's my two cents, anyway. I have actually changed my mind, and I might actually eventually begin to use such things when I can actually afford to, but my main purpose for being up here is to assist the rest of the community, not to make the biggest bucks I can.

@ammonite's comment was ON topic:

@Fyrstikken and Everyone else for the most part - I am saying Me and YOU are not doing the best jobs, and we should take a break and

come up with new solutions that help retain users

instead of bomb flagging people for driving 60 in zone 50.

I suggest changing the Hot and Trending tabs, that would solve much of the problem, if it is a problem.

I think it is a big problem. See my reply to @Cambridgeport90

I think the idea of a designated "team" selecting the articles for the trending page is pretty terrible. If @ned or another whale of his level wanted to they could completely control who is on the trending page by just up voting things they like with $150 upvotes. The trending page is good in that if you want to show someone Steemit it's a lot more impressive to see a bunch of posts with $1000 payouts (even if we know it is from bots) than not if you want to get them to sign up.

Your post is nice. Give me upvot as i give you. I am new at steemit. Help me in satability.

I agree better retention = more assets staked in the long term.

As an investor I want us all to make money, have fun and meet new people. That is what make a community great.

It takes a village to raise a child.

In this case it to raise up newcomers and give them a chance to speak and be heard.

sadly a think the only way to fix it to remove the "power" flagging meaning one vote one account. yes u going to get the users making a lot of accounts but its always ass hols out there , most of us are not going to do it. or make it so that your down vote works in the same way as an up voice using Ur power. so mabye removing some of the abuse.

No, that is not what he is saying at all! He is asking people to curb their enthusiasm from over-flagging a small account with a big account. A Cultural change, not a system change.

Agreed. I'd like for flags to not be seen as an act of war :D
Especially for those that didn't realize they were stepping into such possible hostility.
Flags are just a way to disagree with the current assignment of the reward pool. Upvote is the other way to disagree with the current assignment of the reward pool. Adjusting that balance as you see fit is how steem was designed to work. Culturally, it evolved into something else.

Upvoted and resteemed! Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I have to say ... I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. There needs to be a better alternative to the current way the average community member up here is acting. In the spirit of wanting to become a witness, you better believe that once I do, I'll be one of those who includes some of the negativity that needs to be stopped in her witness report when I see it.

que buena información,gracias por el apoyo ,pero para estas alternativas que tu nombras,que hay que hacer?

I particularly appreciate your opinion. It's true that sometimes there are sheriffs who can block some users, but that's life.

I think you are right, perhaps someone could make a bot that automatically questions people when they flag about if they really want to do that and reminds/informs them of the very good flagging guidelines that Steemit.com provides.

Right on the point! I wonder if rules for posting could be made similar to Reddit. In Reddit, there are certain rules for subreddits which when not met don't allow users to submit posts in those subreddits.

I doubt that there will ever be a better flag-culture as long as there are sociopaths here with a low IQ and high SP. These people only post hate/flame/shitposts and flag the whole day and even gain a following of other stupid people, who believe that what they are doing is "the right thing". This has to stop and the only way I see this to ever happen, is to reduce the possible flags per day to an absolute minimum (like 1 flag/day per user), so that these crazy people have to look for another hobby, where they don't can hurt people out of selfish reasons. There will never be an adult flag-culture as long as there are BS-people and BS-followers who blindly apploud this crazy behaviour.

Yes, this aspect is really vital because we should not drive us emotionally and enter into an FLAG WAR inturn we have to use flag system to improve this Steem Economy and in that way we can see that we are moving towards in an economy which holds diversified content but moving towards one goal and that is strong and clean community which inturn can attract more potential users/customers.

Yes, the most important components of Steem Blockchain is customer/user and we have to act in an way where we can increase the percentage of user retention. And as an community we can create great opportunities and we have to collectively look towards that.

And everyone is stakeholder so it's not the job of one person or some group of person and instead it's job of everyone to look towards improvements and to produce solutions instead of complaining because if we have to complaint then we can do that for whole life.

Keep up the great work. Thanks for sharing this post with us and wishing you an great day. Stay blessed. 🙂

You're right - flags have to be handled with care.

But I think it would also be interesting to implement another downvote option which would be separated from the rewards pool.

Instead, those downvotes would have only an impact on the ranking-algorithm on Steemit. That way, bad content could be removed from the visibility of trending/hot pages without destroying the rewards and driving news users away.

What do you think about that?

I like that, actually. That's one of the sorts of things that I thought of mentioning, I just didn't seem to have the words for it.

Posted using Partiko Android

I'm going to be very unpopular, but I will repeat again and again.

Steemit Inc. asked you for help?
They have troubles with user retention and they do not have a solution?

Just in case I missed it - could you please point me to the post, document or link where they have mentioned that they have it in their goals, plans or even they care about user retention? Do they even care about users that post strange posts that got upvoted for hundreds of $?

I'm saying that this is not an issue for Steemit Inc. and they have different plans for this year. It is useless for such posts if you are not in charge and do not make decisions in behalf of Steemit Inc.

Steemit Inc. asked you for help?
They have troubles with user retention and they do not have a solution?

What has this to do with Steemit Inc? Nothing, I have not seen them doing any policing. What I see is a myriad of small 1000 SP accounts ganging up on someone with 70 SP.

I work for Fyrstikken Inc. We have a million SteemPower and vested interest in this blockchains culture & future. If anything I have seen Steemit Inc. delegating power to fight flag abuse via the @adm account run by @pfunk

I'm saying that this is not an issue for Steemit Inc. and they have different plans for this year. It is useless for such posts if you are not in charge and do not make decisions on behalf of Steemit Inc.

I think you see Steemit Inc the same way as you see Facebook Inc. Which is not the same. Steemit Inc develops software for the Steem Blockchain and we vote if we like their updates or not. They are not the moderators or the admins around here.

You do not need Steemit Inc to give you permission to be kind or less violent to other steem users.

@adm account run by @pfunk...

@pfunk = @berniesanders ?

things get more and more confusing. I will be happy when I have downpowered completely and sold all of my steem for break even bitcoins.

What a waste of time this platform is...

I agree. I had an encounter with both Bernie and Haejin... A ton of post rewards removed...

But there are some times when flagging is good; e.g. fake identity.

Very well said - spot on - user retention should be in the focus of all Steemians.

This is a useful bot. Well done