Breaking rules that don't exist

Malicious User

My account was recently flagged as "Malicious" by fx(hash) moderators. I was surprised since I didn't do anything malicious. What I found is that you can be relagated from the fx(hash) platform for breaking rules that don't exist.

Background: Poor Design Decisions

Rewind to the launch of fx(text) this past Thursday, August 30, 2022. With much anticipation, the community came to explore the new features introduced to the fx(hash) platform for creating and sharing content. Like many, I am a big fan of fx(hash) and was excited to try out fx(text).

Once the doors opened, I realized the fx(hash) team made a problematic design decision. Specifically, URL paths (also called routes) get auto-created for articles based on the article title. If a person wants to write an article about "fxtext", for instance, the very first person who does that will have a route to their article that looks like this: https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/fxtext

I commend andre, for example, for recognizing this fact and acting quickly to reserve fxtext as an article title, a placeholder or stub for future work. Since articles are editable, it makes perfect sense to do. Reserve the title you want. Do the work later.

If you extend the line of thought, create a placeholder for future work, it's not difficult to conceive of fx(text) as a type of (editable) wiki. But in contrast to Wikipedia, for example, only one author can manage the page AND the authorship of that page is non-transferable.

This one design decision, creating the URL path from the article title, creates an unnecessary dilemma.

A Real Solution

The fix is easy, especially early on. Simply give every article an id (already done in the database) and use that as the path/route for the article. If you look at my (appropriately titled) article on NFT Rarity Guides, you can see the fx(hash) team has done that, only as a punishment, rather than as a real solution to the problem above. Here's that link: https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/id/344

How fx(hash) Responded

As mentioned above, my account has been flagged as "Malicious" although I have done nothing malicious. The team provides no explanation for their actions. To someone on the outside, it appears both arbitrary (I don't like what you're doing) and unprofessional.

If you read the User Moderation markdown on the fx(hash) GitHub repo, there is no explanation of Malicious behavior. They use the word itself to define it: "the account clearly shows some malicious behaviour." Again, this seems arbitrary and subjective.

A Better Way to Respond

Recognize and admit a poor design decision, policy, etc. Take steps to remediate. Communicate any policy changes.

What not to do? Punish people for using your service. If certain activities are restricted, make it very clear and give people warning. Even better, prevent them from doing it in the first place. Don't respond with knee-jerk reactions and assume bad intent.

Additionally, treat everyone equally. I have been singled out by the team for punishment. Other people performed the same actions, just not to the same extent. There are less than 400 articles on fx(hash) right now. It would literally take a moderator one hour to click through every link and decide if someone has created an article simply to reserve the URL and keyword (yes, many have). But the fx(hash) team has not performed this simple exercise. Instead, they are arbitrarily enforcing a new policy toward me and not others. And they still haven't fixed the problem.

The Impact of the Malicious Status

There are a great number of implications on the fx(hash) site itself, but also on-chain. I will share all the fx(hash) implications of which I'm aware.

On your profile, everyone will now see a banner that reads:

Warning ! This User has been flagged. This user was flagged as malicious by the Moderators.

If you have published articles, every flagged article and every new article you publish can no longer be accessed from the original link. Instead it is the /article/id/<id>. If you have shared links to your content, they are now broken and a person visiting it will see an error page with no link to any article, and the message reads:

An error occurred. This article has been flagged and as such it is not possible to access its URL with the slug. We do not want to encourage "domain-sitting" practices.

If someone has a direct link to your article using the /article/id/<ID> link, everyone will see at the top of every article (new and old) a banner that reads:

Warning ! This Article has been flagged. This Article was flagged as undesirable content by the moderation team.

If you have used the Tezos content feature in an article, linking to other fx(hash) content, any link back to your article is now broken, similar to what is displayed above. This happens even for new articles.

For example, on September 5, 2022, I published an article on Garden, Monoliths. I included Tezos content from Garden, Monoliths in my article. My article now displays on the Garden, Monoliths collection (authors can hide it if they choose), but the link to my article is the one that includes the title in the URL instead of the ID, so it breaks and gives the error above. I have no control over which version of my article link is displayed there.

Any new article published is hidden from the Article feed and cannot be searched by tag, title, etc. The only way someone can access it is to know the link (ID) of the article.

Your personal sales feed is now broken and returns an error.

Summary

Treat people fairly. Clearly communicate expectations on the front end. Fix problems you can fix. If you've been unfair in how you treat consumers of your product, admit it. Reverse course. Make things right.

Update After fx(hash) Team Response

After a few Twitter exchanges with the team (screenshot below), I can identify other design flaws the team should own. They accuse me of spamming the platform since the articles feed was clogged with draft articles.

It's a poor design decision to allow all articles to appear in a single platform-managed activity feed. Just imagine if Medium, Substack or LinkedIn did the same. It would become useless to anyone. People need ways to discover new articles, but a single feed for everyone for all new content is a bad idea.

On Discord, after reading of people losing their articles due to closing their browser unintentionally, it's also obvious that being able to mark and save an article periodically on-chain is a good idea. The team could have provided a mechanism for creators to do that, e.g. tagging it with 'in-progress' or 'draft-article'.

I believe my actions of saving draft articles is not spam. I have no interest in the articles feed and was simply creating draft articles. My actions in no way could be described as spam based on a definition of spam either. Here's a definition of spamming from Wikipedia:

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing), or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user.

What's also helpful to note is that the fx(hash) team views marking an account as 'malicious' as equivalent to 'banning the user' from the platform.

As well, they view spamming as a malicious activity. Here's a definition of malice from Merriam-Webster dictionary for reference: