As a relatively new user, I was excited yesterday when an informational post I made was gaining at least a little bit of traction. The post included affiliate links, and I actually wrote a disclaimer at the bottom of the post letting people know about the links.
Today I logged in and noticed the post was flagged and not showing up in feeds. Unfortunately, @SteemCleaners came along and wrecked my post, it got blocked and sent to $0.
The first question I have for the community at large is do you really want to completely wreck people who use affiliate links? There are thousands of bloggers who we WANT to attract out there that unfortunately would get completely slammed if they tried to use Steem at the moment. This is not appropriate and I think we should welcome people using their influence to sell whatever products they want to recommend.
The second is what can be done to reimburse users when their posts are impacted by these down-vote bots. Because currency is linked to influence on Steem, when you directly slam someone's influence or reputation for an incorrect reason, it is akin to stealing from them.
Users don't just lose the dollars from the down-vote, they lose all of the eyeballs of people who may have looked at their post and up-voted, and they lose the benefits of branding and of gaining influence. So it seems fair that these bots use some of their power to compensate people via upvotes when they are incorrect.Thirdly, as Steem grows, how will the bots keep up with requests to remove down-votes and compensate the user for faulty down-voting.
Fourth, how do we as a community prevent bots from abusing this down-vote technique to destroy the freedom of speech? Personally I could see there being two super powerful bots, a Conservative bot and a Liberal bot that both identify opposing accounts and down-vote all of their posts to oblivion. Do we really want that to be a part of Steem?
The ability to absolutely silence people we don't like is dangerous and I can see how it will be abused in the near future.
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@punreal, I am fairly new here, and I can understand the frustration of having some success be destroyed here. However, one thing that I love about Steemit is that it is a place to read great content without being overloaded with marketing of products and services. If a user is in business they can link to their website right on their profile page. If they post great content they can direct people to follow up for more information on their products and services by going to their profile page for their website link. A person can give disclosure without providing a link in their article. Personally, when I am reading an article, and discover that it is actually a sales pitch I back out, and move on to a new article. I get enough marketing to from so many other places. I don't want to be marketed to on Steemit. I've upvoted this article because I want to help you get it seen, not because I agree with you. And I have followed you now to see what other ideas you have. Cheers!
I understand your preferences are to not see any marketing materials (which in my mind is impossible because every piece of communication is a form of marketing), but that doesn't mean ALL people who disagree with you should be silenced completely.
But that's the thing, you don't have to upvote people if you don't like their marketing efforts. Similarly, you can down-vote them for that very thing if you're really off-put by it.
If there are enough people like you, it will not be profitable to share affiliate links on Steem.
However, I would argue that no one account should have the down-vote power to completely silence someone for posting things they don't like.
I agree with you on these things, @punreal. I still have not figured out how to down vote something. I thought that perhaps it was a feature that became activated once I passed a certain threshold of time or influence or something like that. Free speech is important, and I wouldn't want Steemit to loose the ability for many different points of view to exist. But I also hate wasting time wading through posts that are really selling products or services. We are all selling ideas. By the way, I checked out your posts, and I love the puns! I'll be checking in on you often! Cheers!
Same thing was happend to me buddy. My post was downvoted by steemcleaners. Reason is 2 or 3 lines i copied from souce and didnt mention the source link. Except that whole post i Wrote myself in my own way. My post down to 0 earning and my reputation score down from 33 to 27. So frustrating.