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Is boosting bad content as much of a problem as downzapping good content?
Not really sure. But I think we have more tools for ignoring bad content than we do for finding good content that doesn't get surfaced.
Trust did some of that work for us. Perhaps we're seeing the downside of eliminating trust.
I thought about this for a bit but I don't think we can tell. Because with the trust removal a whole lot of other things had to change, it's the entire package in it's current form that doesn't work - that's measurable.
Trust act like a blanket. It dampens the noise and keeps some of us warm, but it doesn't extend to everyone, so some will sit in the cold, especially newcomers, because trust gets built. Without trust the playing field for newcomers vs oldtimers is level, but we now found out that there aren't enough sats circling around to repel attacks at this scale, at least not at 3x disadvantage. More sats were spent to defend some good posts up than on the downzaps, but it wasn't enough to keep the posts visible. Defenders have lost 2 rounds now...
Defenders have lost 2 rounds now
We're still in the early stages though. The rewards are going to be huge today.
If we're in a high downzap environment, then we are also in a high rewards environment and equilibrium zaps will be higher. We don't know yet if that equilibrium will be higher or lower signal.
We're still in the early stages though. The rewards are going to be huge today.
I've spent 200k on defense today and fished 60k in rewards that way for everyone - so I guess you're all welcome haha. Defense is a huge expenditure, but gotta take a stand sometimes, even if it hurts. Lots of insight was gained; that's the real value here.
What i find really interesting is that the defensive zaps mostly (70%) go to the stackers who work on the posts you zapped, while the downzaps 100% go to the reward pool. So on any kind of longer term scale, zaps ought to promote the kind of content we want to see more than downzaps discourage it. Downzaps only are succesful if they manage to hide the content before people notice it.
Nonetheless, it is true that we saw the true power of downzaps today.
So on any kind of longer term scale, zaps ought to promote the kind of content we want to see more than downzaps discourage it.
Yes, but I think that I learned (again) that as soon as financialization - of "other things" such as a community board - becomes a foreground phenomenon, it opens up to plays for power, greed and other less beautiful aspects of the human tribal brain. For example when I hear people say steemit on SN, I shudder because that's a great example of financialized community building that completely enshittified because of these things, combined with serial founder syndrome (i.e. it wasn't maintained.)
The thing that gives hope for SN (to me) is that the team is putting their hearts into this and want to get it right (and keep it from turning wrong.) That passion is the only reason I put up with the user-is-tester dynamic, haha.
We're certainly in your debt on this day, but norms may adapt to this environment and such outlays could become unnecessary.
No debts owed! It was an interesting experiment.
Personally I expect that @k00b will drive the change technologically (with @SimpleStacker's trust-with-decay maybe?) rather than that there will be a change in stacker norms.
oops
until the last week, I'd say boosting bad content was a worse problem.
I think we have more tools for ignoring bad content than we do for finding good content that doesn't get surfaced.
This feels like it is true though. It is more frustrating when you can't find good content than when you see bad content.
I remember haha
it is a problem for sure. It'd be bad though to expose SN to a new problem in an attempt to fix this one.
Back in August there was that scammy pig.gy site that tried boosting their post to the top of the feed (#1090193). They boosted it by 160k sats and it got 20k in downzaps and was outlawed. There is no more outlawing, but if (when) downzaps = zaps, such posts will be more difficult to bury. At the moment that seems less bad than the current downzap fest. But I wonder what will happen if we have someone who is really committed to boosting shitty content.