RE: The elephant in the room you don't see until it steps on you or someone near you...
Bernie downvoted a comment of mine, but I essentially called him a racist, so it was not unjustified. I have seen some justified downvotes for tag abuse and identity theft and I thought it is kind of cool, that everybody has some sort of policing power, well at least if you got Steem Power.
It's hard to say. I don't know if he is as active at it as he was. I know he was auto-flagging anything stellabelle wrote recently or so she claimed to me, though I noticed some of her stuff was not flagged. I'm not sure, and didn't really look into it. Bernie has the potential to do great good and great harm. I simply hope he comes out on the balance of doing good, and I am optimistic that he will.
As to solution... it will not be easy. I wasn't actually asking for a solution.
I was more or less just going over the situation for the benefit of all the new people.
It is probably the biggest BLEMISH/FLAW in the system at the moment. Yet, we haven't really come up with a solution.
If I see a problem I start thinking about solutions, does not matter if I am asked to or not ;)
To be fair I had a rather unpleasant convo with Stella, I like her and had some good talks with her before, but I really hate passive aggressiveness.
Yeah, I don't always agree with Stella either. She's written some things I strongly disagreed with. Yet I won't follow her around flagging her. She has also written pieces I strongly agreed with.
I actually will NEVER flag a piece because I dislike it. I'll only flag spam, plagiarism, and abuse. In such cases I'd likely negotiate with the person before flagging.
I very much dislike the flag. I prefer the market approach myself.
I know you do, but I think the fear of downvotes helps Steemit. Flagging for disagreeing or other reasons is a shameful act and I would personally never do it, but we have to live with people doing it or we need actual police, imo.
Yep, they are going to do it.
Then our job is to try to convince them to hopefully change their ways. We simply cannot expect them to say "Gee you're right" and instantly change. That likely won't happen. We however may influence them in ways that over time could lead to change.