Why You Shouldn't Buy Votes & You Should Flag Those Who Do

If you've been here more than a few days, you've likely heard about the various ways that you can pay for votes on here. There are some that maybe aren't quite as bad, where there's some sort of qualifying factor and then there are places where they don't give a fuck. There are communities where you pay with your vote, either on a community bot's posts or on other members posts, and then there are bid bots, where everyone competes for the limited votes of a bot, often with insanely high SP.

After you've been here any length of time, and you start to realize maybe you won't get paid well for the amount of effort you put in, you might start debating if you should use bots to boost your income a bit. You've likely already either been using them or have decided not to. But why exactly?

When we all got here and started reading up on how this place works, a social contract began to form in our brain. All of Steem relies on this social contract to function correctly. While "code is law", this social contract is instrumental in keeping this place working.

so·cial con·tract
noun
an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection. Theories of a social contract became popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries among theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects.
_{From Google}

We've already started to see it fall apart as more and more people use bots. Trending is full of shit posts that have insane payouts, where we don't even know how much they're actually earning. It's one thing if some shit post is in trending because of a lot of people liking it and quite another if it's in trending because the writer bought votes for a good ROI.

The social contract of Steem is that we will all try to find good posts together and upvote them. (curate) We are all supposed to be working together to ensure that quality content is rewarded and rises to the top. So many people are violating the social contract and there's no recourse because people are afraid of flagging.

For example, putting a user on auto-vote is a violation of this contract, but only a small one if they consistently post good content, and continue to. But it's one of the current tools we have to try to ensure we don't get up to 100% VP and lose votes, and it allows us to continually support an author, so right now, it's a necessary "evil".

Following a vote trail is a bit better than this because you are entrusting your vote to another, but it can still have problems if that person accidentally votes on the wrong post, or intentionally votes on shit to sort of embezzle through the voting system.

The true violations of the social contract though, is selling votes. You are intentionally ignoring your responsibility as part of the system, to curate, and even going against it, by selling your vote to people who don't deserve it. There needs to be some sort of recourse for this.

It may not be written into the code that you have to curate good content, but it is part of the social contract.

One might even argue that the large accounts that aren't voting on anything are violating the social contract as well. By not voting when they have such a large stake in the platform, they are allowing the shit to rise to the top. They should be using their VP or SP in some way, rather than just letting it sit there while the platform suffers. The large stakeholders could solve the issues of bid bot abuse and voting rings very easily, by just choosing to follow the social contract that the community conforms to. While I would prefer they flag some of the worst violators, and upvote a few awesome posts occasionally, they don't necessarily have to curate themselves. They could delegate some of their SP out or entrust their vote to an individual or community. Or they might task a small group with finding posts for them to vote on. Or simplest of all, they could simply follow a vote trail.

Might I suggest following the #SteemSTEM voting trail? They have pretty high standards and help ensure Science and STEM-related content is rewarded on here.

Whales have huge votes that to a certain degree are not even being used right now. Entire new communities and curation groups could be formed around finding good content for them to upvote. Their votes shouldn't go to waste, or worse yet, their votes sold or SP delegated to bid bots.

The worst violators of the social contract are the bots with seemingly no standards and no one who checks what they are voting on. At least @themarkymark checks his bot and removes votes on plagiarism and the like. Without anyone to check to determine if the content should be rewarded so highly, they're just ignoring their responsibility to the community.

Those who create giant bid bots to violate the social contract for their own profit and those that buy the votes aren't the only ones that are ignoring their responsibilities though. So many members of the community are. Every time you decide to not flag a post that is utter shit yet highly rewarded, you are ignoring your responsibility. How someone votes is their own choice, but when it is a violation of the social contract of Steem, we are all responsible for correcting it, so that Steem doesn't turn into an absolute shit show.

Until tools are made to better curate and some form of solution to the bots is found, we all have the responsibility of setting aside at least a bit of VP to flag the violators of the social contract. This place survives due to the social contract that we are all ignoring right now,. We have to seek out the best content to upvote, and flag the worst, to ensure this place is the best it can be.

_{Image by Nick Youngson/Alpha Stock Images CC BY-SA 3.0 (source)}