I doubt many will read this post because of my unfairly damaged reputation. I hope I’m wrong.

I'm writing this post for two reasons.

1. To see if the community can help repair my reputation, which was unjustly damaged.

2. To trigger a debate about the reputation system, which I think is flawed and highly autocratic.

Photo credit: Kstudio - Freepik.com

A few days ago I deposited a small amount of Steem, powered up, and started to curate posts. My initial intent was to curate almost exclusively, but I wanted to learn the process before investing more Steem Power. Assuming that the reputation system was reliable I began curating posts, taking care to avoid those posted by users of ill-repute. Then, low and behold, yesterday I discovered that I myself was of ill-repute! Knowing that I had done nothing unethical or malicious, I was naturally shocked. After making only 5 comments and curating for 2 days it was easy to find the cause. It was in this post:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@whitebear/steem-white-paper-translated-into-russian-language-steem-belaya-kniga-v-perevode-na-russkii-yazyk

I was downvoted by hipster for leaving a positive comment to this post. Hipster claimed that it was a poor quality machine translation, instead of a human translation. I don’t know if that is true or not. But, instead of simply stating his opinion for everyone to see, hipster proceeded to downvote everyone that left a positive comment. I think that was very childish and arbitrary. If I knew it was a poor translation then I certainly would not have approved the post. I’m not a Russian expert and hipster can’t expect everyone to be so. Another commenter (lovejoy) felt the same way I do.

@hipster, furthermore, it is wrong of you to downvote other people responding to this thread in the affirmative. (Which I wasn't) It's the OP poster you're after, not those who were duped by a machine translation. Some of the commentors don't even speak Russian. How are they supposed to know??

If this is indeed a poor translation, then I was duped by the original poster. I regard myself as a discriminating person that isn’t easily fooled. But, I don’t claim to be that way 100% of the time. If hipster is right, then I was indeed duped on this occasion. In hindsight, I can see that I should have withheld my upvote or positive comments, unless I was able to verify the quality of the translation; that is a curator’s duty.

So, what am I trying to accomplish here?

A downvote from a user with such a high reputation (8) caused a lot of damage to mine. This has definitely soured my opinion of the reputation system and has made me consider leaving Steemit altogether. But, I first wanted to appeal to the wider community before I made a hasty decision to leave. The general opinion may be that I was justly punished for my innocent mistake. If so, I will accept it and depart, powering down and choosing to invest no further money or time into the platform. But, I suspect that many other new users in this situation will react the same.

Photo credit: Kjpargeter - Freepik.com

And now to my second purpose…

Shouldn’t the reputation system, which seems to allow the tyrannical and reckless action of a single user to ruin another’s reputation, be modified? That is quite autocratic in my opinion. Furthermore, it disturbs me that this user still maintains a high reputation after acting so rashly. Shouldn’t this type of behavior have consequences? I believe it should if the user acts that way repeatedly, though I must confess that I have no ideas about how to implement such a plan. However, concerning the impact that a single user has on another user, I think some sort of consensus rule should be implemented, whereby several user’s votes are needed to alter a reputation. It may be that this has already been addressed or there are problems with this approach; if so, I apologize, but I haven't come across them here. In any case, I do find it alarming that a single user can have such an effect on another’s reputation. If this continues to happen to new users who make innocent mistakes, I think many will eventually abandon Steemit before they really get started.