Purpose
Effective and justifiable moderation is impossible without consistency and engagement within the community.
The policy presented today, here within the Hive ecosystem, is a result of community involvement spanning back to the early days of the Proof of Brain tribe/community.
The Verify Your Brain (Vybrainium) tribe wishes to further update the VYB moderation policy and report its changes to the community.
Before we dive deeper into the starting fundamentals of the VYB Moderation Policy, we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone, past and present, who has taken an active role in the tribe's development. Members of the community have voiced their opinions consistently which has led to changes in our perspectives time and time again. Think of VYB as a community-driven experiment, where we seek to continuously adjust, and in so doing, continuously improve by keeping the good and discarding the bad or ineffectual.
We'd like to continue with this in mind to allow room for the VYB Moderation Policy to evolve and breathe freely alongside the community.
We seek your engagement and genuine attention to ensure that this policy ticks the important boxes allowing the VYB platform to flourish into a magnificent community here on the Hive blockchain.
Prologue
The platform is now active, and the community is and has been actively engaging. Unfortunately, some have participated in VYB with better form than others. We've muted several authors, and will cover that in another article later this week.
We must all do our part on this platform to protect what we publish. We will be discussing a proposal presented by @notconvinced that would ease how we can accomplish this goal. Still, while being a part of the layer-2 platform, it requires certain behaviors from the community, to maintain some level of decorum within the overall ecosystem.
Tribe MUTE Function
All layer-2 tribes possess the ability to mute authors directly (with respect to their specific tribe and token). When a tribe uses the mute function, the effects only apply to that specific tribe's token and front-end. Invoking the tribe-specific mute function enacts the following:
Author (account-level) Mute: With an account-level tribe-specific mute, the tribe denies all upcoming tribe-token rewards to the accountholder (both author and curator rewards). This is a reversible action, meaning that as soon as an account-level mute is removed, upcoming rewards for which the payout window has not yet past will still be issued. While the account-level mute is active, the accountholder's comments and articles will show up as 'hidden' on the tribe's front-end.
Article Mute: Hive-Engine is currently working on enabling article-level muting via the rewards-pool smart contract. The community will receive a new update once admins have verified that we can mute individual articles.
Moderation Purpose
Moderation protects the community from abusive behaviors related to both upvotes and downvotes.
Abusive Downvoting (ADV): We've all either been subjected to it or have observed it. ADV occurs when large stakeholders apply downvotes without reason or justification over an extended period.
- Layer 1 allows downvotes for virtually any reason, per Hive's design and written and unwritten guidelines.
- Downvotes are often the source of intense drama; without discussion or justification downvotes appear subjective, lacking rationale.
- It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the drama from the DV without engagement.
Abusive Upvoting (AUV): Scammers can and do act to defraud the platform within its very boundaries.
- Moderation is one means to ensure rogue stakeholders don't abuse upvotes.
- Although most tribes rely on DVs to moderate AUVs, the VYB tribe will moderate AUVs via the tribe-specific mute function.
- AUVs occur far more frequently than ADVs.
Cross-Layer Moderation
- Verify Your Brain is a layer-2 tribe interwoven within the Hive blockchain (i.e. layer 1).
- Actions taken on layer 1 against a content creator can only affect layer 2 after careful evaluation and specific action by the tribes' admins.
- The VYB admin team actively and enthusiastically supports the Proof of Brain tribe; as such, if an author commits fraud within the Proof of Brain community, the VYB Anti-Abuse Team will also take action within the VYB community.
Again, as always, many scenarios exist that may point towards abusive behaviors. The following discussions will lay out how the community intends to address these behaviors.
Potential Moderators
If anyone is interested in fulfilling such a role in the community, please don't hesitate to contact @scholaris.
Moderators would:
- Assist in developing a moderating schedule where they would agree to spend a portion of their time reviewing content.
- Document the articles they have reviewed via an online collaboration tool, such as Google Sheets.
- Receive compensation in the form of a POB and/or VYB delegation. The delegation would be active whenever they are assigned to and fulfilling a "moderator" role.
- Update: @jesustiano, @ajanaku, and @iyiade are the first people to express their interest. They are currently assisting @scholaris with daily moderation duties.
Implementing Mute Actions
Application of the mute function occurs with justification and confirmation, and will be accompanied by on-chain notification:
Whenever an author is deemed to have engaged in behavior that warrants a tribe-specific mute action (which will occur only after an extensive review of the situation has been conducted by the VYB Anti-Abuse Team), the mute will be applied and a comment will be published, explaining the reason for the mute and requesting a response from the author. In particular, the following response will be requested:
- State the reason for the mute action, as you understand it.
- State the reason(s) why the tribe should remove the mute.
- State your willingness to engage with the anti-abuse team regarding what you can do to prevent future MUTE actions.
If the author fails to respond, the mute action will remain in force, indefinitely.
If the author responds, the Appeals Process will begin (see below).
Transparency Regarding Mute Actions
The VYB Anti-Abuse Team will regularly publish notification posts that will identify all the most recent tribe-specific mute actions, the affected authors, and the reasons for the mute actions.
Responses to the notification posts will be monitored and moderated such that all muted accountholders will have ample opportunity to interact on-chain with the VYB Anti-Abuse Team. This is possible by virtue of the way layer 1 functions independently of layer 2 (i.e. a tribe-specific mute action has zero impact on the way an author's posts or comments are displayed on layer 1).
The VYB Anti-Abuse Team reserves the right to coordinate with any other moderator or regulatory group (i.e., HDR or HW, etc.) to confirm that the alleged behavior qualifies as 'abuse', or to explore it further within the new emerging paradigm.
Reasons for muting an author include, but are not limited to:
- Plagiarized articles falling under Plagiarism.org's guidance will receive a mute.
- Spam/no-content/phishing articles will receive a mute.
- NSFW/violent articles will receive a mute.
- Multiple violations by the same author (including alt accounts) will have a mute applied to that author's account and alt accounts.
- Fraudulent activity is not covered by this policy.
Mute Appeals Process
An appeal option is available to every content creator who has received a tribe-specific MUTE action on their account. Content creators wishing to appeal shall:
Attempt to contact the anti-abuse team on the blockchain first (it is important to have a public record of the attempt). Then contact the anti-abuse team via discord as a secondary path to appeal a tribe-specific mute action.
- State the reason for your mute as you understand it.
- State the reason(s) why the tribe should remove the mute.
- Engage with the anti-abuse team regarding what you can do to prevent future MUTE actions.
The author will also have the opportunity to address the applied mute by responding to the VYB Anti-Abuse Team's notification post (see above). It will be readily available, openly mentioning those who've received a MUTE action.
Once the author responds, a timer will be applied to their account.
- First offense warrants a 1-week tribe-specific mute on the platform.
- Second offense warrants a 1-month tribe-specific mute on the platform.
- Third offense leads to an indefinite tribe-specific mute.
- Application of a tribe-specific mute action can be reversed at any time by community vote (i.e. using the VYB Stewardship Board's balloting process), after the first offense.
Tag Abuse
Tag abuse represents an act where an author:
- Uses tags irrelevant to the content posted, or
- Uses an excessive number of tags (i.e. beyond the standard 10-tag allowance).
The VYB Anti-Abuse Team will work to mitigate any problems caused through tag abuse.
Self-Voting
While self-voting (SV) is allowed on the Hive blockchain, it will not be permitted on the Verify Your Brain platform.
While we continue to set things up on VYB, you may notice that self-voting indeed has been occurring. There are several reasons for this:
- We need the community to become accustomed to the rules and have the opportunity to review and understand the guidelines (such as are contained in this moderation-policy document).
- We are still waiting for the Hive-Engine dev team to enable article-level tribe-specific muting (currently, only account-level muting is enabled).
- We are developing instantaneous communication systems, so that transparency and clarity are provided for all moderation actions. This will be in a timely manner, before and after tribe-specific mute actions are taken.
There are many different potential arguments regarding the issue of Self-Voting, such as:
- Self-voting represents a way to declare via the blockchain that you have faith in the work you publish.
- Hive allows self-voting, so all other communities and layers should follow suit.
- Self-voting simply provides a mechanism to more effectively use your Voting Power (VP), i.e. to earn higher rewards. As such, the more VP you have, the higher your potential rewards resulting from SV.
- Argument #1 is understandable. You are investing in your work. Just don't be greedy, yes? However, when you self-vote, and the SV rewards are higher than anyone else who votes for you, it may be perceived as problematic, depending on how much VP you have. (Newer arrivals to Hive weren't around when
Steemcreators expected the community to SV as a means of promotion, ... or did they, really?). - Argument #2 is also understandable. Hive allows for SVs, but not blindly and not without recourse, because Hive also allows other account holders to downvote (DV) any post that has excessively benefited from self-voting. On the other hand, DVs against SVs on Hive may be considered subjective, and are often not evenly applied -- some accounts regularly receive the hammer-drop while others do not. Hive's a prominent place.
- Argument #3 is more of a statement than an argument. The more VP you have, the more rewards you will earn when you curate yourself (i.e. self-vote). Is this fair? Some ardently say "Yes!"; others just as ardently say "No!"
Position
As was clearly stated in the initival VYB white paper, self-voting will not be allowed on VYB (including upvoting by alt accounts). The arguments in favor of self-voting are understandable. However, whereas VYB represents an unequivocally downvote-free layer-2 experiment, removing DVs while allowing SVs creates a potential moderation nightmare, especially when it comes to the potential for large stakeholders to reap substantial 'rewards' even with relatively small SVs (percentage-wise).
As such, we will be providing on-chain warnings to those who SV, and future mute actions for those who persist despite the warnings.
If you wish to SV, you are by all means welcome to do so, but you must use the following tag to inform VYB curators that your article is not eligible to receive VYB rewards:
Community Decision & Decentralised Moderation
At the very beginning of this article, we discussed about effective moderation and how it is impossible without community engagement. @notconvinced wrote an excellent VYB proposal to introduce tools that would allow the community to flag potentially-abusive content for further scrutiny:
We feel like it wouldn't do that article justice by trying to reiterate its recommendations here in this article. I leave it to the community, the VYB Stewardship Board, and the VYB Admin Team to review it and consider the following actions:
- Would developers be able to incorporate such tools into the VYB platform?
- How can we monitor community flags and report on statistics?
- Who will oversee the reporting?
- How long would it take to develop and test the implementation of the new tools?
- What would be the costs of development and maintenance (and how would they be funded)?
@notconvinced has presented a brilliant initial proposal and we should support its development as a community (or the refinement of the proposal into a working model to be implemented on VYB). The benefit of this recommendation is that it would give the community a greater voice in how the platform gets managed.
The Future of AAT Moderation
Levels of moderation: VYB Anti-Abuse Team (AAT) consensus, VYB Stewardship Board (VSB) balloting, NotConvinced & LogicZombie's community-based flagging & decision-making to expand decentralisation.
These levels are not necessarily in a chronological sense. Some decisions may be able to fall directly into a more decentralised structure of decision/moderation, some will require crossover (e.g. VSB has a decision to make and reaches XX% of the ZZ% required threshold, rather than relying on the all non-votes equalling YES, some decisions could be filtered down to a wider community concensus vote).
Putting ourselves in a box with regards to moderation is the fastest way to segregating ourselves and detracting those who find MASSIVE value in decentralisation. More information about our progress towards decentralised moderation will be published in the future.
We'd like to further extend thanks to @notconvinced and @logiczombie for their perspectives on this complex topic. We hope that others will follow suit in sharing ideas and solutions, in this ever-expanding environment, so that we're able to continue developing the VYB and POB platforms into a leading example of considerate community-backed concensus; with sufficient safeguarding to prevent malicious abuse.
In Closing
Moderation of VYB activities seeks to level the playing field.
We want fair treatment of all content creators to allow them to have the opportunities for leisure and business that layer 1 offers. The moderation policy presented in this article continues to represent our commitment to protecting the platform, its content creators, and investors.
Thanks to the community for reading along with this article. We look forward to providing more in the future.
