Things to Remember

Being here for almost two months, I have seen lots of commentary here about the problems that flagging has added to SteemIt. There are people who are mad that their content has been flagged, they tend to bash or attempt to retaliate against those who have flagged them. On the other side something that seems to have been lost over the last two months is the fact that a few months ago, before I joined SteemIt there was a user account that was posting content that had simply been plagiarized and basically taking a large portion of the total payout for every post.

If we have a voting system where we could only upvote others content, then a repeat of that account can be accomplished, being smaller users would simply upvote to gain from the curation efforts. This system would simply leave SteemIt to be gamed by people who are not adding value, that kind of content from what I have read has already cause many to lose faith in SteemIt prior to my joining.

Not having looked at the flagged content to often I did see a post where one of the people flagging did take their time to reply to someone who had been flagged. Things that were mentioned in the reply was that the content was not based in facts, and was more an opinion that could cause fear or distrust in SteemIt. It seems as though the people who have been flagged are mainly mad that they are in their eyes losing a portion of the reward that they feel they should get or deserve.

While I have been here on SteemIt I did once come across a post that made me so angry I wanted to down(flag) the post. Remembering an article I had previously read by@timcliff, I realized it was not in my best interest to flag the post as it was not false nor was it bad. I made a decision to avoid voting, later I found the individual that wrote the post is not always the best at word choices and is very unique and cool person. What I learned is that unless I see a major reason to flag a post, as in plagiarism, or a scam, there is not to much of a reason to flag a post. That being said the flag is present to prevent scammers or plagiarizers from taking over, it is not there to use just because something made you angry.

Challenge

A challenge I have is, would you buy something you knew had been plagiarized, and even offer a portion of what you could make that day to buy it. Your votes mater the amount of Steem produced each day is divided between the posts created, so if you upvote something of no value, you are essentially hurting your own potential payout for your hard work. I would venture to guess no one would want to pay someone for something that the other person did not really create. Therefore we have accounts such as @steemcleaners, or @cheetah which are looking for people who actively plagiarize or post things of not much value.

One of my early posts I was hit with a comment by SteemCleaners, I was rather upset, but glad it had not been flagged. They gave me a warning that what I had posted was not of any real value, I took the criticism and moved on. Recently I had a post that @cheetah said I had copied content, I admit I was rushing out the door, and quickly trying to post about a contest I set up and it was the final day, so it was my own fault.

That being said I feel there are several steps that are being taken to warn or let others know what they are posting is not considered to be of value here as it is plagiarized or not supported by evidence. If everyone was trustworthy and not simply seeking a profit at anothers expence then the voting system would not need to be weighted the way it is. An example my wife told me about is her current manager went out and bought an item from someone for a cheap price, and immediately turned around doubled the price and sold it for 100% profit inside the same day.

Voting

Aristotle one said, "Evil draws men together!" With out a means to control voting, as in if there were no down votes SteemIt could be over run and value would be reduced to 0. Being Ned and Dan have a vision in mind and are both looking toward the future of where SteemIt is going, and looking at the past and seeing what has happened, they have had to include both an up and down(flag) vote into the system. Steps they have taken to prevent complete automation have been first

A major part of minimizing abuse is the rate-limiting of voting. Individual users can only read and evaluate so many work items per day. Any attempt to vote more frequently than this is a sign of automation and potential abuse.

This lead to users who vote more must use less of there voting power per vote, the slider, to prevent losing their voting power. This leads to the voting pools. I have seen people both pros and cons about voting pools. Being that I am new to social media, and new here on SteemIt I am thankful for these pools. They have helped me in the past a few times. Their are people who are looking for new users or unknown authors, with out these curation tails new people may never be found, thus they may not want to remain active.

In a decentralized system there is no direct way to ban users nor centralized provider able to host a reCAPTCHA and enforce rate limiting of accounts. In fact, the inability to censor users is one of the main selling points of blockchain technology.

This is a good reason why the weighted voting system makes sense, assuming that those with the most weight, the whales, are committed to the improvement of the system as a whole. This being said

those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system.

The system here even those on top must work to prevent abuse. There is one problem that has come up, that is the users who do nothing more than vote, but do not contribute any content such as replies or posts. These kinds of account could be used in a negative way to vote on content. The question then is how to reduce or impact those users in a way that does not hurt the system as a whole. I think that with the weighted system there could be a way to take the users reputation level, or activity, of commenting or posting into consideration to the voting weight. Then a user with low voting percentage and a low reputation would make little or no difference, but a user with large SteemPower, but a low reputation should also have a reduced weight being a lack of reputation. This could prevent people from buying into the system, or attempting to gain SteemPower simply to be destructive from the top.

Conclusion

We are SteemIt, as a community we vote on the quality of the content that is being created. As a community we can make a difference, either as a small player, or someone on the top, we all can make SteemIt a better place. Thank you for reading and please leave a reply, I would like to know your thoughts.

Image Source 1, 2
Modified Image Source 1

I also used a couple screenshots I took from my own account and posts.

Source 1, 2

Thanks to SteemVerify.com and @elyaque

Thanks to @papa-pepper for the last gif.