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RE: STEEM SCHOOL EP 1 - HOW TO WRITE GREATS COMMENTS TO GAIN FOLLOWERS & UPVOTES!
That's a very concise and clear article.
It does indeed make sense to avoid controversial topics, drama, fighting, flag wars, insults and bullying.
However it makes me wonder:
if all community members avoid contradicting or challenging the ideas in a post, isn't it going to make the discourse a kind of vanilla conversation, where bloggers would rarely receive constructive criticism, even when their content is untrue or erroneous.
Would following the rules you suggest take away some of the essence of online communities, where people learn and develop by challenging ideas expressed by others, as opposed to constantly agreeing with the ideas presented in posts?
You are correct Yannay, the truth is that if you offend the wrong person here that they will downvote your ass into bankruptcy.
Steem is promoted as decentralized but it isn't. The guys with the biggest wallet rule here and they can take your money without any regulations.
So it is better to fit in, sad but true.
If you want to talk without filters you join the Berserkers server, there you don't need to be afraid to be downvoted.
I think we should all speak our mind - as long as our mind is reasonable rational and well thought out. That does not always work. I once analyzed an ICO that someone was proting on steemit in his blog. I read the white-paper, he did not. My analysis contained a list of red-flags, like “most of the advisors they claim are connected to the company, do not bother to mention it on their linked-in page”. The blogger flew into a violent and abusive rage, and downvoted all of my blogs. (I never downvoted him). I called in the help of @lukestokes who had a lot of steempower at the time (I had almost none). The blogger then started swearing and abusing Luke for coming to my rescue verbally. That was the bloggers mistake.
That’s when I realised I should buy some steempower.
It's unfortunate how immature some people are. They have very tragic expressions of their unmet needs. Having Steem Power and using voting strength to downvote abusive communication is, so far, one of the only ways to deal with some people.
Exactly @lukestokes. If you are serious about steemit and you don’t want to be the victim of some troll, then you need to have a lot of steempower.
I would like to thank you very much for your help on that case, which happened at a time when I was too SP poor (and too new), to know how best to handle the nutter.
Sometimes it's fine just to ignore them and go your way. It's not much for these crazies when they flag people and don't get the emotional outburst they thrive on. It's just a downvote. That's all. Ignore and move on.
They need to rework the Flagging System, maybe get 5 people to confirm the flag or something to make it harder to abuse it.
And by the way: Thank you for the upvotes gentlemen.
Many see the problem right now as not enough downvotes. It costs people voting power they could use to gain curation rewards. Instead they get flag wars. There are many posts about scammers taking from the rewards pool without providing any value, so making it harder for downvotes to happen would only make that problem worse.
Every proposed solution has unintended consequences which should be considered in great detail. Some are thinking about a possible flag rewards pool or even a separate bank of voting power for downvotes to prevent abuse. It's some tricky stuff and may not be figured out until we have SMTs to play with different approaches.
Turns out I still don't know enough about Steem.
You are welcome to comment here Luke, your comments are additional knowledge for me.
I agree, @lukestokes, any new solution to flagging may have unexpected consequences. I guess the topic of downvotes often gets debated on steemit (I have seen quite a few).
Right now I am doing my own thing with downvotes - mainly for spam commenting, more rarely for plagiarism.
My preferred approach is warning first. Then if the spammer does not heed it, I use a small 10% flag to get his attention, with a promise to remove the flag if he learned the lesson. 10% can go to 20% - and so on if the behaviour does not improve.
On a bad-day, I am not beyond giving an immediate 10% or 20% flag for the most blatant cases of spam (with an explanation of course).
It rarely happens that someone flags me back. Mostly I get apologies, and then I remove the small flag. Even if they flag me back, I tend not to bother with retaliation. My high steempower means they can’t harm me. I just try to focus on changing their bad habits.
Sometimes I realise I am dealing with robots. (Robots can post plagiarised internet articles, changing just enough words to fool @originalcontent and similar plagiarism detection bots). There’s not a lot of point in giving warnings to robots.