SAVE THE REWARDS POOL! Let's Talk About FLAGGING POSTS! You ALL Should Do It More Often. It Is Your Civic Duty.
YOU ALL NEED TO START USING THE FLAGGING THE FEATURE MORE OFTEN! QUIT BEING SCARED!
I've noticed that people seem so fearful to use the flagging feature. This is absolutely detrimental to the platform as a whole. The feature exists for a reason.
There are a few problems here on Steemit that are absolutely plaguing the platform and they are DIRECTLY affecting you, as well as everyone else. YOU can do something about it, but it requires you to quit being a baby and to start responsibly doing your civic duty here of USING THE FLAGGING MECHANISM.
As many of you may have noticed, the payout rewards since HF19 have rapidly decreased. The rewards pool is being ravaged by assholes that are worshiping themselves and stealing from you. How are they doing this? By self upvoting every damn thing that they post and not upvoting anyone else. I've seen countless users here that will drop by posts to give you a comment in the form of "lol," "cool," "nice post," "great content, check out my blog and follow/comment/upvote," "this is so funny," and so on and so forth. This would be fine and dandy, but these people are giving these worthless comments their own personal 100% upvote while typically giving you, the content creator, nothing in return. No small vote, no vote at all.
These people are PARASITES. They steal from the rewards pool and essentially from you. You see, the rewards pool is not some magical spell of infinite money. Steem has an inflation rate, which is essentially the rewards pool and it is very much finite. If parasites like these continue to get away with this kind of behavior, our payouts will be reduced to pure shit.
So why should I be flagging people that are doing this?
Well, because they suck. And in my eyes, they are absolutely detrimental to the entire platform. Not only are they lazy, but they're robbing the rewards pool, the very thing that pays YOU, the legitimate content creators that are making this platform successful, beautiful, and fruitful for all.
What does flagging actually do?
When you flag something, you essentially are saying:
"I do not think that this post is worth what is currently being shown, so I want to remove some of the currently allocated rewards that they are currently being granted from the rewards pool and return them to the rewards pool so that they can be allocated in a more appropriate manner, thus allowing more worthy human beings that are creating great content and helping this platform succeed to get a better, tastier, more delicious piece of the pie as they actually deserve instead of this asshole."
So who needs flagged!?
- Rampant self-upvoters. These are the people who are THE WORST.
- Plagiarizers. These people are stealing content and re-posting it as if it is content that they have created. These people are essentially thieves.
- People being assholes to people for no reason.
- People perpetuating hateful ideologies.
- Fraudsters/scammers/trolls/spammers.
- Whoever you think needs to be rewarded less for their content. That is your right.
BE VIGILANT!!! SPREAD THE WORD!!!
FLAGGING IS YOUR CIVIC DUTY AS A PARTICIPANT ON THE STEEM PLATFORM! FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT, BE A HERO, AND START FLAGGING THE BAD GUYS! WHEN YOU FLAG PEOPLE WHO DO NOT DESERVE THE REWARD THEY ARE GETTING, YOU ARE RETURNING THAT BACK TO THE REWARDS POOL SO THAT IT CAN BE DISTRIBUTED MORE FAIRLY! SO START DOING IT!
Over and out!!!
PLEASE CONSIDER @AGORIC.SYSTEMS FOR WITNESS
Just remember, every time you flag a post you are taking away one potential up vote you can make for the day.
Is it worth it?
You can also view it as giving back the rewards to the rest of the posts that did not get flagged.
I personally used around 20% of my VP today to flag a guy that was on a rampage. Fully worth it! Felt great. Enjoy that few hundred bucks I sent back to the pool!
thank you for your service!!!!
My pleasure! If the rewards pool isn't spread around appropriately and people don't fight for its proper use, everything goes to shit.
If considered, the absolutely yes
Tragedy of the commons.
THANK YOU for this post!
I flagged my first post the other day-- someone straight-up ripped off a news article and posted it verbatim here, AND spammed popular tags in the process.
I appreciate your perspective on the process-- I'm still learning the platform, so it helps to hear from someone with more experience like you!
Stuff like that sucks and ultimately takes away from everyone. I don't enjoy using the feature, but I also feel like it's my duty to use it responsibly, and also explain why I did it. People need to start setting examples. It's like a bunch of people going to a food bank and a few assholes come with bigger bags than the others, filling them to the brim. Should other people responsibly taking enough for themselves say something or should be lay down and just let it happen?
I personally would be saying fuck those guys and making them put some back.
Good job I like that there are some bots out there that scrape the web and call out people who repost others material.
I don't agree at all, this would only start a flagging war, and here the most important thing is, how do you discern what deserves a flag? If a buddy of yours copy pastes something, do you flag him? So my post is crappy, do you flag it? Obviously when something comes to a vote it is a subjective matter, what seems insulting to you might seem great to me. Like for example this post, the people who are flagrantly asking for vote will see it as insulting, so should they flag this post? Look at one of the most controversial persons here @berniesanders, many people say he is doing a great service, then he flags them and he becomes an asshole. No I think with flagging all you get is a lot of bad will and nothing positive comes from it. This is supposed to be a free speech platform, if you don't like something ignore the post or mute the person.
I think that you are confused to an extent.
Flagging = Free speech. Freedom to disagree with the payout for what you perceive as shitty content. Do you understand that someone paying themselves several hundred dollars a day for saying lol, haha, cool, literally lowers the rewards pool permanently when it pays out?
When I see someone abusing the mechanism, I will in turn disagree with their payout in terms of a flag, relinquishing it to the rewards pool for the greater good of the platform. If everyone bends over and cowers down, this will continue. You're essentially saying what's equal to a citizenry not rising up against their corrupted leader because they're scared. Somebody has to have a spine . . .
It sucks because you are both right and maybe the system is broken because really there is no "right" or "wrong" but rather just the bigger set of wallets will win. I still love Steemit but now I have to rethink my life.
j/k, not that serious people ;) Great discussions and interpretations of how people are using Steemit itself going on here
Well in the end I think there will be more "good," people than "bad." And eventually what becomes more fruitful? Flagging or getting along and using the platform correctly? I think the latter would win out in the end. We have to find balance somewhere, and I think that it doesn't reside in being apathetic.
Again, what you consider shitty content is subjective I might consider it great, as for someone paying themselves hundreds of dollars, yes it sucks, but then what you should be doing, you that have a lot of power is demanding from @ned that he not permit self upvoting, have a new hardfork giving attention to this, that would solve the problem, and I'll tell you something personally self upvoting a post you consider good is not bad I think, now a comment is different, I upvote my own work at a whopping 10 cents a pop each time, so I'm not getting rich, I always comment because I want my comments replied to or upvoted, it doesn't matter how much I get for the upvote but it helps increase my REP, comments I never self upvote. In any case your flag is worth something mine would reduce the rewards of a spammy post by 10 cents, and I think my money is better spent rewarding posters who only get pennies with a couple more pennies for their efforts.
Sure, "shitty content," is subjective. If I flag something and you don't think it should be flagged, upvote the comment. The system is designed that way. Points can have counterpoints and so on. A flag isn't the end-all be-all.
Just because your vote isn't worth much at the moment doesn't make you worthless. If no one bands together, this all crumbles. It's like saying that voting in an actual fair, transparent election is worthless because you're one person, you know what I'm saying?
Flagging is an option, and I'm not saying EVERYONE go do it, but be more conscious about its existence. Maybe smaller stake holders that want to flag/build themselves could just comment on a shit-post with "someone should flag this for X reason," and some other guy can swoop in and save the day?
@gduran we are talking about people who make a lot of money by upvoting all of their comments, not some newbies that make 10 cents by upvoting their comment.
Like I said previously, it makes me sad to see so many great posts by new steemians that hardly make a couple dollars while someone writes a couple words like "nice post" or "cool" and makes five bucks.
I perfectly understand, but my flagging them will not do much, now if a group of whales or dolphins did this then you could have a measurable effect, otherwise the right thing is for Steemit inc to just not permit self upvoting, at least the comments.
I think it'd be detrimental to disallow self upvoting, it serves a purpose. I'm coming more from the angle of people collectively banding together to "fight for what's right," and let the system balance itself out. Have a war, so to speak haha.
I agree with you and @gduran. It would be easy to hardfork away the posibility to upvote your own comments. Sadly the real heavy wheight whales just make a dozen of ghost accounts, distribute their vestingpower and then they upvote themself completely invisible for others. Sadly this is also the quite easy workaround of such a hardfork and many big whales just will find undercover ways to give the rewards of their investment to themselfs.
And I didnt even talk about the conspiring whales who just upvote each other on every occasion. What is the difference between having 5 accounts upvoting themself on massive scale and the small fish who wasnt clever enough to make 5 accounts ? the minnows get flagged taking away their few cents because they just have 1 account. From this perpective it is NOT fair to let cluster accounts do what they want (distributing all votingpower to themself) and flag the minor users who where not clever enough yet to make ghost accounts. We should also stop then the fact that some people run voting trails to powerupvote their own stories over and over with the trails.
How can a curator of a trail lets say art-trail or german-traiI upvote their own accounts over and over again???? think this is 10 times more unfair and their are some very well known users with very very high reputation doing one of this hidden tactics this day in day out. And thats not about some 10 cents its about 1000s of $ per week. And don´t even think about to ever flag them, because your done within a week. The ones who have 100 times more steempower will win not the most fair distribution.
Hard to find the ultimate solution. I flagged a couple of fakeID accounts spamming and posting the same content over and over or using introduceyourself tag 39 times.
About that, upvoting your own article is something i dont disagree 👎 with, its a show of self love and self esteem but upvoting your own comments is nothing but stealing, then flagging this type of person is the best we can do to help our society, especially the minnows!
Besides agreeing 👍 with you @gduran, this is a social media, not a grading system. If the owner of this article thinks people should flag any article they dont like because of some reasons it will cause serious flagging wars! The guy you flagged his/her post today will hunt your posts for a flagging revenge! And the whole idea of flagging is just like asking social media like facebook to add 'dislike' button 🔳 to their system! Someone might hate something you love. Productivity won't come out of hate!
The self voting hate has to stop. I used to do it up until recently, but that was just my choice, I was told from the beginning that is what everyone should do, and I honestly I feel kind of that way, the discriminating of people who do it makes the assumption that they are doing it for a negative reason, when we are all here wanting our posts to be seen, otherwise we would all have accounts on Blogspot.
Again, I personally stopped, but this is only like as of last week, the negativity on the practice should be more personal is all I think, and honestly I might just do it again, I like nearly all my comments, not all of them, but a lot, it feels more fake that I am holding back from upvoting only because there are some users who make it out like an issue.
I agree with 2 through 6, but feel 4 doesn't meld well with 1 (maybe because you just called the practice "THE WORST" but without explanation on why it is such a bad thing, I am curious). Great post, hope it gets discussion out of it, because people are way too fearful of hitting the flag button but I definitely am not none of those people, but it also takes a decent amount until I use it.
Voting your original posts is perfectly fine. I'm talking about comments. Rampant comments that have no substance or just suck and that are only being posted so that, that user can upvote. That's what I'm talking about. I think that you're taking the content of this post in the wrong way.
Did you read the entire post? #1 is this scenario:
"I've seen countless users here that will drop by posts to give you a comment in the form of "lol," "cool," "nice post," "great content, check out my blog and follow/comment/upvote," "this is so funny," and so on and so forth. This would be fine and dandy, but these people are giving these worthless comments their own personal 100% upvote while typically giving you, the content creator, nothing in return. No small vote, no vote at all."
I read the whole post, but after re-looking at just the 1 through 6 I guess other peoples posts about the subject is still just resignation with me, because yeah, useless comments are horrible, but the exacting wording of that 1 through 6 is not specifying there is definitely okay times to upvote your comment (but even now, I am just taking a break from it because of odd backlash from various users I follow for the past week, whom are definitely not saying things for the same reasons you are). Your reasoning is sound and I completely agree with that.
Yeah, I might edit in some reasoning for when/why I think that it's fine to upvote your own stuff.
Yeah man totally agree. I was telling someone just yesterday that the reason I joined Steemit back in February was because I wanted to engage with a crypto crowd BLOGGING... sharing original content was my goal.
Now, people are advertising Steem as a platform where you "blog and GET PAID." So, of course people are just going to come here to make money. These MONEY FIRST people are the people to aggressively upvote themselves.
I agree that the stigma against flagging has to be broken. However, I don't see this being a long term solution. I think a long term solution is forcing people to really earn their upvote... this used to be a thing and it wasn't an issue before.
But anyway I am just rambling now. Great post! Resteemed.
Yeah, it's great being paid and it's awesome that we can make this all happen, but it's super shitty when people abuse it. I like the idea of us all collectively, irrespective of our stake, trying to find a balance. People could also just comment in reply to shit-posts with something like "someone should flag this for X reason," and someone else with more stake could swoop in the save the day. I understand some smaller stake holders want to focus on building themselves and spreading rewards around VS flagging.
But yeah fully agreed, the stigma needs to die and people need to quit being babies about it. It's like not voting in an actually FAIR election. Not participating makes you at fault for the detriment of the greater good.
I do not agree with points 3 and 4. Steem (above all) is a platform for free speech. There is no free speech without the so-called "hate speech".
Also, I'd like to mention that you shouldn't flag all posts that don't share your viewpoint or posts that you simply don't like. Don't overuse the feature, only use it when it is blatant shit.
I would also like to mention that upvoting your own comments isn't a reason to flag. Yes, there is a debate of whether it is correct or not to upvote your own stuff, but while the possibility is present, use it. Just don't spam pointless comments that don't bring any progress to a conversation only to upvote it and earn a miserable 0.01 SBD.
Point 3 is practically synonymous with 5 I guess you could say. Again, this is just a way to combat bullies, etc. Should bullies be rewarded? No. It isn't censorship, it's just saying that they don't deserve to be paid for sucking.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to say it, I'm saying that it's a good idea to remove rewards for hateful things. That's like saying it wouldn't have been cool to tell Hitler to shut up, you know? He can talk about killing Jews all day, but it's up to society to reply to him with "you suck, shut up, dude."
I see upvoting your own comments as fine, but is moderation and with respect. For example if you have a point you think that is well laid out/said, and you want exposure in a long line of comments, sure upvote yourself a bit to bring your comment up in the ranks. I also think it's a-ok to 100% upvote your original posts. I also think it's cool to use comment upvoting in the event that you have been wrongly flagged.
Thanks for the input!
Firstly, #HitlerDidNothingWrong. Secondly, no. Even if you think someone is "bullying" (there's no such thing as cyber-bullying), that doesn't mean that person shouldn't be rewarded for his/her thoughts. The last thing we want to see is Anti-Fascist bots flagging posts of people who have a slightly right-leaning view.
Also, I do agree that any death threats or any speech that falls under international law should be flagged, but minor things such as "You never had a giveaway, you're a fucking Jew" shouldn't be flagged as it is just a comical comment that shouldn't be taken seriously, and yes, the person deserves payment as he/she criticized someone's behaviour. Criticizing is free speech, doesn't matter if someone thinks you're a filthy Jew. Maybe you are. How should we know?
Point of interest: I'm not a fascist, that hashtag is just a 4chan joke. Free speech though, so bite it!
You really believe that, though? Picking at people for no reason and attacking their character from an unprovoked position repeatedly isn't bullying? Bullying is defined by "prone to or characterized by overbearing mistreatment and domination of others." I see what I've described to as bullying. Do I think that people need to toughen up and just deal with people like that by not giving them attention? Yes, I do. But do I think that people taking that approach to interactions with other human beings? Definitely not.
So if you have a nice quality post, for example, giving someone a lesson in coding and I just drop by to say "fuck you lol you are a dumb piece of shit," and I upvote myself, I shouldn't flag you? That is my freedom to do so. Flagging is a mechanism to agree with rewards. I will flag anyone that is detrimental to a community.
I fully get what you're saying about using race and so on in a friendly, harmless manner as humor is fine as well. I'm talking legitimate call for violence or something, true hate speech. Or for example if someone was like "Kill all gay people, here's why, etc etc etc," to me that's hate speech and fuck rewarding that, you know?
I feel ya! I have a dark sense of humor a lot of times that I think that people would probably hate, but to me, satire is golden and a fantastic way to laugh at stupid ideologies.
You are free to believe whatever you want to believe. I am free to believe whatever I want to believe.
The "Kill all gay people" one is fine in my opinion. The person is showing his/her perspective, we should listen to it, even if we largely disagree with it.
Here's my scenario for flagging a user:
Let's imagine a post titled "My Grandmother Died, Here's Her Story".
There's nothing gay about the post.
@skankhunt comments "Ur gay"
That's completely unrelated to the post, it is getting flagged.
This is an example of my point #3.
Dude, I couldn't agree more. I'm putting together something for tonight that I witnessed last night. This person commented literally a hundred times and sent .01 SBD to the @minnowbooster bot for self-votes. The votes got him 20 cents a pop. Do that a couple hundred times and . . . well, you get the idea.
It is our civic duty. I have only recently begun to flag these people. And seriously, I feel good about doing it. Many of us work our butts off to get a 10 dollar post, a 5 dollar post, etc . . . I understand using the bots to get more exposure, but some of the ways they are being used now is malicious to the platform.
Like you said, "Rampant self-upvoters. These are the people who are THE WORST.
Plagiarizers. These people are stealing content and re-posting it as if it is content that they have created. These people are essentially thieves."
Yep . .
Fuck yeah let's get this poison out now so it doesn't turn into a plague in the future i will start to be more mindfull of this, Thanks Matt !!
Thank you so much for this post .....
I learn so much from you @intrepidthinker and @robrigo , I never used the flag before but now it only makes sense to , you guys are the best and because of guys like you steemit will only get better and reach its greatest potential.
You're welcome, thanks for the nice words! We do our best.
Flagging isn't something that should be thrown out all the time, or even daily/weekly. You gotta use it responsibly and for the right reasons, no one likes to have stuff taken away! haha
Damm i didnt flag so far , or very rare due plagiarisum only . I mute all follow for fallow spam on my post . The problem is when you disagree with some of the big namse here . People are just scared to say any word .....
That's what needs to change, people being scared. If I see another large holder flag for no reason, I'll start talking to them about it. And if they are just being mean for no reason, there are MANY more large stake holders who are actually good people and that would be willing to step in and negate the asshole-whale's flag. I think it will balance out in the end and people will see that it pays to be good and doesn't pay to be bad.
Same old war ... Game of Trones ....... Whale vs whale .... If you ask me steemit had to have a people fo this ... Some sort of people to deside its feair or unfair flag . ... Sadly we dont have right now . Plus when you flag a future about explayn the reason about , like reports in other media will be nice !