Similar to another question asked recently, but I'll reframe the thinking:
If there is outright illegal content being boosted to the top of Lit on the front page, do/es the owner of the territory/s to which it was posted assume the moral responsiblity to downzap it?
Iirc territory owners receive 70% of boosts and to ensure a post is taken of front page Lit, Downsats > Zaps, so then the attacker can extract a potentially heavy cost to the moralistic territory owner (30% of their boost). An attacker with deep enough pockets can put the latter out of business, or risk the charge of being an accessory (?).
Alternatively, the owner spends the 70% boost revenue on downzapping, and community members step in to cover the remaining 30% to hide the illegal post.
Are there enough stackers here that would step in? I'd like to think so, but considering a scammer (borderline illegal) is still able to squat on the front page, I am not so sure. Maybe the justification here is this scammer is being more annoying than illegal.
It is a bit scary to think about this type of attack occurring.
I don't think that there is such a thing as an imposed moral obligation. So I chose "no". We all choose our own destiny.
However, I do ask myself, why would someone that receives 70% kickbacks, be free of any and all accountability for outcomes? If we withhold our judgment call until the scam has materialized victims, then the damage is done and it is not only too late, but much more expensive to do right versus when the spread of the scam was prevented. Of course, no territory owner will ever do right by the victims of the scams they got kickbacks for. It will be a "sorry", at most. And probably not even that. Perhaps the only reply will be HFSP.
The scammer will likely come back and it is concurrently likely that a prior scam is how they got the money to double-down to the tune of 3M+ sats on a poorly formulated, incoherent advertisement for a new scam in the first place.
So if the territory owners don't have accountability and do not wish to make the scammers pay, then the conclusion is that, if there is any substance to the theory of cause and effect, the territory owner will (eventually) be made to pay. After all, the second law of thermodynamics does guarantee that there is always FO after FA.
I agree with most of your comment except this:
Maybe you can elaborate on what you mean, but my suspicion is that morality is usually and often imposed, even if just through some vague mechanism of social consensus. In a vaccuum, people probably don't just arrive at doing the right thing out of their own voluntary will.
I mean that I am my own harshest judge and I reserve the highest bar for myself. I will never measure anyone to as high a bar as I measure my own actions. I don't even expect for others to be their own harshest judge in turn. Thus, I do not really care what other people do. I do not expect the corruptor of beauty to recognize said beauty. I do not expect the predator to empathize with their prey.
I'm not trying to change people's behavior with my recent posts, or impose some morality upon them. It wouldn't work, as this current round of the SN experiment is completely destroyed by greed. It means the system is wrong, not that the people are wrong. It means that the system will change. Because the desired outcome, where things that clearly a majority does not want to see are not still the top visible post, has not been the outcome of the system in place.
That is indeed the way of the world too, but the problem is that the social consensus seems to agree with me that scammers are bad, right? Or does it? The outcome right now is that the scammer does not get neutralized. I saw a comment from a younger stacker this morning expressing awe of the 3M number and assigning legitimacy to the post because of the number of sats listed, while it being a boost for over 99.95% of the value displayed, aka it has no merit, just someone is gaming a number.
It means the scammer is succeeding. And the consensus is in fact: "give me my sats, do not bother me." "Waste more, suckers." "Please downzap more often, it is good for SN." "You're so generous, downzapper." "I have no reason to downzap because no one comes to my territory anyway". "I need this money". "I'm poor." "I'm in the red".
So social consensus is also "no, there is no obligation". There is an obligation for SN to give me free sats. But not to be a safe place on the internet. You downzap? HFSP. I will not have fun though.
Exactly. So everyone will get what they deserve. And they'll choke on the half million sats. I wish that it were different, but in this world, in this time, I don't think it likely that we'll find much beauty in any big picture. It's only when you zoom in deep enough and put the pile of shit under a microscope that you can witness the beautiful dance the bacteria are performing.
Maybe a more illuminating question would have been to ask not in the definitive, to ask instead about the subjective:
Maybe I unconsciously didn't ask it that way because I am still interested in this abstract mechanism by which we (i.e. society, Stackers etc.) arrive at 'the right thing' and whether people here think in terms of definitive morality, or whether they just act based on monetary incentives.
I hold people to a higher standard, i.e. both can be wrong. That said, I try to temper my expectations of them. In a community where the law is perfect and sacred, people will still get caught transgressing it. Most moments in history, to my mind, where attempts were made at engineering pristine human behaviour--we groan at because of a glaringly fatal mistake that became obvious only in hindsight. That said, I'm not opposed at attempts to engineer something that tries to leverage human greed to create social harmony.
On the other hand, I am thinking of morality as a kind of insurance against anti-social behaviours understood as harmful to the group, i.e. profiting by a crime or scammer puts everyone else at more risk. (The cosmic balance you alluded to, FAFO, etc... Another eg.: You might like screwing your first cousin, it might not even be illegal to screw your first cousin, but that doesn't preclude the potentially damning consequences it has to your offspring in an oopsie scenario.)
Well put.
Ahhh, another Opti-ism for the books.
I'd have answered that one with "yes". I think more territory owners would have too. Not a majority by my count on the other post, but at least a whole lot closer to 40/60 instead of under 15/85.
I'm past opti-the-dictator. Even though I'm supposedly good at it. I'm also very good at gaslighting people into believing that what they're doing is their own idea. I just don't really like myself much when I'm in that role and I've been quite successful in avoiding it for the last 15 or so years. So, under the condition that I get to speak my mind - and for all I care it gets downzapped to oblivion - I generally let people be. I do think we can make a 1000x better world if people think things through sometimes, but there aren't many examples that inspire people anymore. Currently, it is, in most if not all aspects of life, more appealing to take than to give.
In this case, I think that because SN is a product under development, and k00b is searching to build a ranking/recommendation system that aligns with something closer to democracy than plutocracy - i.e. something that reflects a common ground based on what stackers feel is quality content - and is not easy to hijack or abuse, it is the system that is wrong right now. It was an experiment and it was announced as such. Honestly, I think that it's already amazing that it lasted this long.
It could have been closer to functional when people would be acting a bit more in long term shared interests than their own short term ones, but the fact that people don't is imho enough evidence that the experiment got something wrong. Which is a pity because I liked the idea of this system.
I think that if we were a town instead of an online community, the outcome would be quite different. For some reason its not just the money that has "magic internet" properties, there are also the magic internet personalities. But we are on a website here and not in some town, and chickenshit scambois that would never even dare opening their mouth to me f2f are here peddling horseshit. So something does need to happen and I don't think that the group as a whole is ready to give up sats for that battle. Which fwiw is still, despite me not wanting to hold people to any high standards, extremely disappointing to me, because we have so many great people here. If we cannot do this, then who can? I say no one.
At least there is still beauty!!!
Framing it as a question about morality makes it more difficult for me to think about. Lots of pedants will say that morality != legality, and while I dislike pedantry, in this case it is a good distinction.
In the case of something like a death threat or doxxing info, I suspect that the responsibility ultimately lies with SN -- as SN operates the website.
But if we are asking what a territory owner should do about slimy posts that aren't so obviously criminal that SN has to deal with it, posts that are annoying or scammy -- I'd hope that territory owners feel a desire to downzap such things so that stackers won't mute their territory.
The last 9 months though have demonstrated pretty clearly that a market alone doesn't prevent big spenders from promoting posts that nobody wants to see.
As to the morality of a territory owner potentially receiving sats from scammy posts: it is clearly the case that the scammers would spend MUCH less boosting if they weren't being downzapped. I am not mathematician enough to work this out, but is it possible that territory owners actually benefit more from downzapping such posts? Certainly it is the downzapping that kicks off the huge rewards pools we have seen.
Moral behaviour != most profitable
Unless what you are saying is that the moral thing to do would be to maximize profit so to have more means to 'moderate' illegal content. As pointed out (#1569489) before, territory owners have no ability to remoce the content, only hide it.
This assumes the onus lay with the territory owners because they are profiting most from the crime.
Also, if it doesn't get taken down, then I assume maybe they will be scrutinized along with @k00b as being accessories, but I don't really know.
cleanest solution, imo:
let territory owners remove a post from their territory by refunding the posting fee
if a post is removed from all territories, it disappears.
iirc there is precedent of @k00b not doing so
The death threats, if that’s the word for them, and despicable as they were, were not credible given the context afaik. I’m unaware of any doxxing.
If it's illegal, @k00b should remove it, that's not up for debate. The problem is the scammy, borderline stuff, downzapping there isn't moderation, it's hiding, the content stays up, and worse, downzapping feeds the attacker, it triggers the reward pool and gives the whole thing more visibility.
I think the cleanest fix is the one @SimpleStacker proposed above, let territory owners refund the posting fee to pull a post from their territory. If it's pulled from all territories, it disappears. No downzaps, no pools, no moral gymnastics. And if the system doesn't allow that, then the problem isn't moral, it's design. Either fix the mechanism or accept that money talks, there's no third option.
👏👏👏
I don't think so. If there was something truly egregious and blatantly illegal I would probably suggest k00b remove it but I would leave it in his hands to decide. If territory owners had full moderation powers to remove content I would remove it. But it would have to meet a pretty high bar.
I don't think they're morally obliged at all. For one, downzapping doesn't actually remove the content, it just makes it less visible. It would be like witnessing a murder and saying you're obliged to stand there with a curtain to block peoples' view of it.
I think the analogy is missing an element, i.e. that the criminal sees you with a curtain, and then slips you some money not to hide them.
But point taken.
Oh I think I understand your point better now. The moral question is really about what to do with the boost money, rather than some pre existing obligation regarding the post
The devil's in the detail... as JBP often says.
There are always borderline cases. Governments are making many things illegal; criticising immigration policy, stating scientific facts about certain vaccines. etc.
An autistic genocidal retard might consider it important to state someting that he believes in, but the statement may be seen as immoral and repugnent by many others. A certain Core dev comes to mind. In these cases, free speech must prevail.
And then, the territory owner might be on holiday... having a few weeks well deserved break from [other] bitcoin retards.They are not morally obliged to do anything. Their lack of action is not being monitored in order to update their shadow social credit score... well, unless they're on Nostr.
The more we talk about this issue, the more I actually prefer territory owners use that revenue to support good content.
Ultimately, the solution will have to be making our territories more attractive to good creators than they are for scammers.
I think nope. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. Downzapping posts may inadvertently backfire because people notice that they are gone and intentionally seek them out, their curiosity aroused. If they are occupying the top spaces in Lit, these people may not feel stirred to check them out
if its illegal content, then stacker.news admins should be removing it. territory mods should report it to admins for removal.