I have a question for you, Steemit. But first, I want to share with you a true story that I learned from reading "Charlatan" back in 2010.
In 1885, there was a man born by the name of John Brinkley. Despite no actual medical education, he purchased a degree and became a doctor. His specialty became removing the balls from goats and inserting them into the scrotums of men (and even women), for the purpose of curing a wide variety of ailments, most especially sexual dysfunction. He did this for many years and eventually became a millionaire (goat balls aren't cheap you know), despite his practices being utter bullshit and actively harmful to people to the point of being responsible for their deaths. He even went on to diagnose people over the radio and prescribe them bullshit potions to buy, harming people en masse.
This man was able to lie to people who didn't know any better for decades and got rich of it. With that in mind, my question is the following:
How should this community best handle the spreading of views that cause physical harm, and even possible death?
The tricky part of this predicament is that we live in a world where the internet has allowed us to create bubbles around ourselves such that erroneous views can survive and propagate within digital echo chambers. If you've heard the terms "post-truth" or "fake news", these are the results of these times in which we live here in the 21st century. Technology allows us to plug our ears and hum like never before in history. It's a new Golden Age for the spreading of falsehoods.
I love how Steemit has a very free speech attitude to things. I think freedom of speech is extremely important. At the same time, there is a downside to free speech where lines are usually drawn around communication that has the potential to cause harm, and I don't mean the proverbial "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" kind of harm. I mean "drinking bleach is actually good for you and here are 10 bleach recipes" kind of harm.
So the question becomes how to best handle those kinds of posts. On Reddit, the community is divided into subreddits, and moderators are able to moderate such posts. I'm actually one of those moderators for a subreddit called /r/Basicincome. If a post doesn't follow the agreed upon rules and guidelines of the sub, it is within my power to remove them. But Steemit isn't divided into subs, and there are no moderators aside from admin.
On Reddit there's also a downvote option, to enable a mechanism for the cream to rise to the top, and the shit to sink to the bottom. But the downvote mechanism doesn't exist here either.
Here then comes the idea of using the flag button as the missing downvote button, but I've noticed that because downvoting isn't its actual purpose, and because the effect of this artificial downvote is public instead of anonymous, that the poster of something downvoted will pursue an eye-for-an-eye strategy of flagging everything posted by the person who flagged their post. I'm fairly new here and this has already happened to me in retribution for a downvote, so I imagine the problem must be widespread.
So what should Steemit as a community do about potentially harmful posts?
The laissez faire free market kind of approach is to consider Steemit a free market of ideas, where what's upvoted has value and what isn't upvoted doesn't. But sometimes it takes awhile to calculate value. Take for instance a health blog where someone recommends putting one drop of dimethylmercury in every meal for the purpose of extending life and increasing well-being through the magical power of metal. Let's say hundreds of people start doing that and thanks to the placebo effect, they start feeling great within a few days, so they not only give the post a 100% upvote, but they also send the person Steem and even money to purchase a supply of poison to sell to others as part of a new poison pyramid scheme.
Free market thinking here says that eventually people will begin to figure out that what this person is doing is killing people, and people will stop buying his stuff. Let's assume this is true. In that case, how many people needed to die for the market to respond? Additionally, will that number fall to zero? Or will there continue always being a sucker who didn't get the memo?
It seems to me that Steemit needs to upgrade itself in this area. Either moderators need to be created and given power to remove such things, and/or an official downvote button needs to be added to help lower the visibility of harmful posts, and/or the flag button needs to be officially recognized and explained as the proper response to such posts, with the further possibility of retribution flagging removed.
If people feel downvoting posts by flagging will lead to retribution, that itself is a chilling effect. All the charlatans out there who wish to profit from the way Steemit currently functions will cry out that downvotes are censorship, but you tell me, should we or should we not reduce the visibility of physically harmful, downright counterfactual posts?
If it's wrong to downvote posts that recommend eating raw uncooked pork for its "natural vitamins", how do we help prevent people from getting trichinosis? How do we protect the uninformed from being hurt by those who are either ignorant themselves, or are hucksters like John Brinkley out to make a buck without giving a shit about who they hurt in the process?