When I first joined I got flagged multiple time by @abit and @smooth for this post of a photo I took of the Milky Way https://steemit.com/photography/@azfix/mount-lemon-arizona-milky-way and I have never forgotten that. Everything about the post is original content created by me, but when I joined they were doing a whale experiment and automatically down voted any post that received too much influence from whale votes. It was pretty discouraging considering the time and effort I spent taking these photos. My photos have done well on other social media sites including FB, IG and google plus so it took a while to deal with the reality of steemit. People just have to power through if they create original content that the community enjoys. I never gave up