Synopsis of Security Guild Proposal

Thank you for taking part in yesterday's news discussion; we are not sure if anyone was aware but it was a discussion topic and not actually an approved project. From the various communications received on the topic, we came to learn something interesting, Hive account@sneak from Steemit.com mentioned on a Github comment that flags may be discontinued in future:

https://github.com/steemit/steemit.com/issues/932

There is not support; flagging is not broken right now and the current implementation is not an impediment to our growth objectives.

Perhaps we will revisit flagging/downvoting at some point in the future, but I'm leaning toward removing the UI for it entirely.

Debating the merits and uses of flagging on steemit.com is permissible. Doing so in the bugtracker is not. :)

-- Hive account@sneak (on Github)

There seems to be a strong sentiment from Hive account@sneak and others that a flagging should be removed entirely from the UI, but that does beg the question whether is can still be initiated on the blockchain through a custom interface or script. If flagging were to be removed entirely perhaps peace could return to the platform, but that may be a contentious issue and not everyone may support that notion.

Interestingly enough we can see the exact same comment attack that we faced yesterday happening to others, such as on the posts of Hive account@mynamesisbrian:

https://steemit.com/steemitabuse/@mynameisbrian/the-masses-attack-a-downvote-bot-is-using-the-masses-account-to-downvote-my-posts

The solution for Brian is to either setup a script that detects all downvotes from Hive account@the.masses account and reverses them using the posting key already available to the public, or for that aggrieved person to drain the voting power of the attacking account with an auto-comment script at frequent intervals, the former being a better implementation.

Through posting on this topic we have uncovered a few attack vectors that previously lurked in the dark, namely, persistent targetted comment attacks from accounts such as Hive account@anonymous and Hive account@the.masses which are accounts with posting keys that were distributed publicly upon creation; Sybil vote attacks from nearly 300 accounts allegedly all from the Hive account@sigmajin guild, mostly all small accounts with less than 20 SP each, used to defame a post and making it look like there are 300 unique downvotes where in fact it is just a fewer number of people downvoting, coupled with multiple whale downvotes and trolling, yesterday's post and the New year's post were a perfect showcase as to what dangers and attack vectors can be found on Steem/Steemit waiting to be awakened, while flags are still able to be used.

Perhaps this show of Flag-maggeddon will make the Steem developers' decision easier with regards to keep or remove the flagging functionality on Steem.

Steemvoter Curation Guild

image credit

Out of the ashes of a flag-maggeddon discussion, hopefully some positive light can emerge and we must not lose sight of the great things we can achieve as a combined community and not let negativity divide us.

Imagine for a moment that each day you post a new article you stand a chance of receiving a Steemvoter Guild vote, which if all current Steemvoter customers participate, will mean that the recipient will get up to 1000 votes and 80 to 90$ on their post.

We feel this will bring back some excitement and anticipation of "who will get it next" type vibe and would be an interesting experiment to conduct to see if it can improve general enthusiasm and morale.

The guild will go hand-in-hand with the daily Spotlight Post, where approx. seven authors will be showcased and the top pick of the day will be upvoted by the Steemvoter Guild.

To donate one extra daily vote to the guild, simply ensure that the "Guild" checkbox is ticked in your steemvoter.com dashboard as shown below.

Curation rewards should be good on such posts, but the idea is to do it for the excitement and hype for the active authors to stay engaged and motivated rather than for rewards.

Steemvoter itself doesn't make any profit from this additional service and is merely our way of giving back and helping organise the community into a unified voice to do something really spectacular together.

We have been offered by Hive account@cryptoiskey from the Hive account@steemcleaners to help us pick the winning post of the day and a few others and we are also open to anyone contacting us to join our private guild channel where suitable persons will be allowed to join on a pro-bono basis.

We Look forward to the successful implementation of the guild within 7 days at the earliest, having given everyone enough time and notification to adjust their settings.

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Steemvoter is a public curation bot with an easy to use interface, it truly is a bot for the people, making automatic curation on Steemit easy with just a few clicks.

This is a payment post! Thank you for allowing us to use your Steem accounts to upvote this post by virtue of your free subscription to our service!

Anyone not signed up for SteemVoter.com is welcome to do so or just vote this post to help the project.