Intro

Steemians long have been fighting against abuses. Although we have a useful tool the so called downvoting, it is tiring to monitoring all potential abusive cases and downvote them everyday. In this proposal, I suggest a new systemic design which can reduce negative impacts from abusing, especially reward exploits, while minimizing cognitive burdens on genuine users.

Current design

The current design of Steem against abuse is "decentralized moderation". All contents are located in a global pool where everyone can post and get rewarded. Also, everyone can moderate posts in the global poiol using upvote or downvote. So if there are any abusive behaviors like self-vote for rewards, users can downvote these posts and punish abusers.

However, this system has some problems. First, entrance costs is very low. This means, if an abuser got caught, he/she can create another account cheaply and do abuse again. Second, it requires continuous downvoting (moderation) if abusers keep doing. Therefore, reacting against abusive behaviors costs lot of attentions and voting power.

New system

In the new system, a new namespace "village" is added. To create a village, one should pay significant amount of fee in order to prevent village-squatting. Every posts should be included a village, and every village has at least one moderator (default is the owner).

Moderators of a village can whitelist or blacklist users. That means, if a user commits abusing, he/she can be blocked by mods to post in the village. Additionally, like witness votes, users can vote for village. But unlike witness vote, villages can be upvoted or downvoted. If a village has negative voting score, all posts in that village cannot be rewarded (i.e. rshares under that village is assumed as zero). Downvote on post is obsoleted and replaced by downvote on village, which is a group of posts managed by a set of mods.

In this figure, abusers posted in Village B, but due to negative score of the village, they cannot be rewarded. The abusers tried to post in Village A that has positive score, but they soon get expelled since the mods of Village A recognized they are abusers. The goal of mods will be managing the village socially desirable to attract more people by rewards. Users will have less cognitive burdens to cope with all abusive posts. Instead, they just need to vote once if they think a village is abuser's realm. There still can exist areas of "freedom of speech" but it doesn't always mean "freedom for reward".

In short,

• Users create villages
• Users post in villages
• Village mods moderate users (not posts)
• Users moderate villages instead of posts

Thanks for reading and looking forward to active discussions.