You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Why You Shouldn't Buy Votes & You Should Flag Those Who Do
I like how you put this. Differentiating between the code and a social contract is good. Now, if we could just have people recognize one social contract, instead of seemingly many, with all kinds of variations.
There really needs to be a way for all parties to coexist. Attempting to force a social contract on someone else hasn't been working, and in my mind, nor should it. We're all free to act here. So, that means providing a good argument for keeping the social contract and potential incentives that people can see beyond something like "for the good of the community."
I wish I knew what those incentives were, but I feel like the exist, and that there are at least a few people who are aware of them.
As I posted this, I started to wonder if maybe starting to realized that we're under a social contract might be instrumental in some choosing to enforce it, but perhaps that was a delusion.
I think we're all kind of aware of the social contract, as we all have to go through the debate against bid bots and such, but many of us choose to ignore it, for self-interest. While there are variations in interpretation of the social contract, I think we're all aware that it exists.
It's not necessarily bad if there are variations as well. Many communities exist on using their members votes to help the whole. While that can be a violation of the social contract and your responsibilities, you're sort of trading that vote for helping the members of the community as a whole. If they require you to vote on a member every day, that's not so bad, if you can find a good post. But if they require you to vote on their posts for a newsletter or something, that's a bit worse.
I'm not sure that things like that should necessarily be gotten rid of though, as they are mutually beneficial for the members and usually have some quality standards. The main thing that we need to deal with is the biggest bid bot abusers. We can do that manually but we do need to institute some changes to make it harder to run bid bots.
Even just a few tiny changes might change things drastically.
Like for example, making it so curation rewards were taken from the largest voters first, making it so bid bots earn far less in curation rewards as their posts get flagged.
Or integrating the promo tab into trending.
Or any of a ton of other ideas that people have had.