Some info about my activity and my stance on flags

in #blog7 years ago

Hey everyone!

Thought it was about time I wrote a little bit about my activity here on Steem seeing all these new users join lately and follow. There's also been some drama lately about flags, like usual. We get it, everyone hates flags. Mainly due to the way they are imported onto the front-end and people getting used to using them only on plagiarism and abuse. Weirdly though many seem to not realize that "disagreement on rewards" is one of the highest reasons to flags. There's been a lot of talks to change the way flags work, some have suggested to use them as downvotes instead next to the upvote button. Maybe even give them their own daily voting power or curation rewards so more users are incentivized to flag/downvote as it right now costs the flagger potential curation rewards to flag.

In a recent example there was a new user who has started receiving a lot of votes from a new unknown whale account - unknown due to its inactivity from before. The frequent poster started seeing huge rewards and like many authors tend to do - especially those getting autovotes - they get used to the income quickly. Especially now with SBD still being way overpriced they become even more sensitive to flags. Essentially it's an issue because the authors see the rewards and often don't understand how the platform works exactly. I'm not going to go into if the author's content deserves the rewards or not as all of that depends on the eye of the beholder. Bear in mind though that it costs the flagger to flag these down, and most of the time the only people benefitting from these flags are the rest of the authors on the platform. Why? Because the reward pool gives out a certain amount of SBD and Steem per day which means we all share those rewards. Steem Power helps us allocate the rewards of the reward pool to authors and we get rewarded for that through curation.

As many have stated before though, if you can accept all the upvotes - you have to be able to accept the downvotes/flags as well. Especially the flags as they are disincentivized from normal upvotes. The main reason that people get so riled up about them is due to the author being the one taking it personally and then their fanbase follows. There's been so many instances, even from friends of mine who I often chat with, where the author got so offended from a flag or two that they overreact on it. Demand answers, write rant posts and then their followers also get riled up about it as well and it creates so much unnecessary drama. Especially if the authors take it so personal that they on purpose start telling their followers to demand that the flags be removed or not cast, to followers who most of the time start more drama in comments and as someone who's been around Steem and knows how the platform works is very disappointing to read knowing they know so little about everything here as they are that new.

I just want to tell anyone here reading, that please. Do not take flags personally if they are cast due to disagreement of rewards. If they are cast for other reasons, there are plenty of support groups that will help you out or you can make posts about it asking for help or question why it is happening - I bet many users that happen to read them and can counter them will vote you up if you have been flagged unfairly. For the longest time that I've been here though I've almost never seen minnows who don't make overly huge rewards get flagged due to disagreement in rewards.

I also wanted to talk about my own position I am in right now as a high earner on Steem.

For many newcomer followers and others who might stumble upon my posts it may seem like I am being overly rewarded and that's a fair assumption. I do also get flagged from time to time and I have no problem with that, if older users feel my posts are getting too much rewards than that's their prerogative. Remember that anyone can use their SP as they want - but they also have to accept how the rest of the community acts on their use of their SP.

What many newcomers may not know though is that many of us older users here spend a lot of time outside of the platform. Now I don't want to make an excuse to my high rewards, but it is a factor which I believe many other high influence voters know about and that might be why they more often than not decide not to flag.

I am someone who has spent most of their time the last year and a half on this platform because like many others we saw the potential and knew how powerful it was. Even when prices were going down from $4 to 7 cents, we stuck around and built. I spent so much time trying to market the platform on my own that for a long time I didn't even post and earned that cheap Steem Power at the time to build up my own account. I focused on curation and commenting which were barely rewarded at the time just cause I knew it was the best way I could keep the platform active and make authors feel appreciated for the work they were putting towards a platform that at the time seemed like it was dying.

There is a lot of history that many newcomers may not see and judge prematurely when accusing someone of making too much rewards, or in the example from above when they start lashing out on the flaggers and calling them names and this and that without knowing their history and what they have done for the platform. I don't expect all newcomers to look through the history and ask around others what each and every account they interact with on the platform have done in the past before interacting with them, but judging people just cause they are flagging your favorite authors is not a good way to go.

I don't want to make this too long, but yes, SBD is crazy at the moment. Like I have said in the past I won't judge people for posting more frequently right now and I've been trying to do that myself as well while holding back at the same time to let others earn rewards too and curate accordingly. I realize it's a lot of value that we are earning from rewards right now but I also realize how much we can do with these rewards for the future of the platform. It saddens me often to see many other authors only take and take while getting voted up by autovoters and posting 5-10x more than they would have when SBD was down to $1. It's even more sad to see them not power any of it up even though it's obvious that the price of Steem is still so undervalued and they'd gain more by buying Steem with the SBD. The worst part is seeing them spend most of their limited voting power only on themselves and not even reward commenters that are keeping their blogposts from looking like graveyards with full of cash in them. Some of these users are one of my main encouragements to post more actively and take a bigger piece of the reward pool knowing I will invest most of it back onto the platform and keep curating for a long time as I have even when I had 100x less SP to curate with.

I wish that more curators would look around a bit when casting their votes. Sure most users have deserved them and should make the most out of the insane price of SBD right now, but you don't have to be a genius to realize that someone who's constantly powering down and posting 10x a day while selling all SBD is doing nothing but siphon rewards from the platform. Now if you think of these examples, wouldn't you want some of those users to get flagged so that the rest of the platform receives more rewards?

Anyway, feel free to let me know your thoughts and how you see these things unfolding. There's so much happening lately with all the new users and increasing activity it's really hard to catch up with everything even as a curator who tries to spread his voting power as wide as possible.

I'm going to try and post a bit more this week before @ocd is back and curating again to make the most out of these rewards to be able to power up my account more and be able to delegate more SP to new curators that join the project.

Thanks for reading.

Image from Pixabay.

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That phrase: "If you accept votes, you should accept flags".

I agree 100% on the stance about rewarding users who plan on powering up and keep the flow going instead of those cashing out... rewarding people who are committed to Steemit is what we should be doing.

Personally, I have NEVER had to down vote anybody. However, there was an instance yesterday I did.

AS being somebody on this platform that I feel could help the smaller minnows, I post daily, a blog stating that I am willing to offer such help for a marginal fee. Well, I suppose this user knew about down voting but didn't have any SP (as it was a new account), yet they down voted my post. It didn't affect me at all in regards to my payout but the user stated it was in regard to fair distribution of the reward pool assuming that I am taking a huge percentage of it? But in retaliation, I down voted the only post he had a formidable payout on and completely wiped it out for them.

Upon realizing that the actions I took were not in any way acceptable to do, as it was a form of retaliation, today I went back to the users profile and removed the down vote so he could get his payout.

I felt bad for what I did and didn't want to destroy the perception of this person in regards to Steem. This platform has great potential and personally I would like this user to benefit from what I have to offer by my up votes.

I don't want to be mad at them for some dumb reason and I don't want them to quit because they're not getting what they want right away. IT is something that you have to work at and for to gain anything out of it.

Remind me to not get you mad. Thanks for being fair to the red fishes. We red fishes have a lot to learn being etiquette on steemit. Thanks.

That's a very conscious realization and correction action! Awesome!

You are a great person, the beautiful thing is that you corrected thinking about the other.

Thanks for being an awesome Steemian!

Thank you for the notion. I believe in the greater good of people and I know that if there is a change I wish to see... I can be that change. And ultimately the experience most likely isnt good marketing for Steem. But I hope that I can help this person grow. As well as all my other followers.

It gives me pride knowing I helped many ideas flourish and gain the recognition they deserve.

Following @sreepyeldarb

@acidyo,
I really love your point. Someone once flagged my post just after 30 minutes of me posting it on steemit. When I had received 2 upvotes and made $0.04 and was hoping for more this guy 'with 700SP flagged me and as a result my payout got reduced to 0 and my post became potentially useless and invisible to others. I couldnt understand how and why he did that. There was no reason fo that.
Is this even fair? I mean I get that he has more Steem Power, hence more control over posts but IS THIS HOW FLAGGING SOMEONE SHOULD WORK ? SHOULDN'T IT TAKE MORE FLAGS THAN UPVOTES TO HAVE SOMEONE'S POST DOWN RATHER THAN ONE PERSON DOMINATING THE SHOW ?
This scenario can occur often and may result in domination of such guys over the steemit network making steemit week as otherwise new steemians like me are going to loose faith in the system hence the currency itself. Thank you.

SHOULDN'T IT TAKE MORE FLAGS THAN UPVOTES TO HAVE SOMEONE'S POST DOWN RATHER THAN ONE PERSON DOMINATING THE SHOW

That's how it works here, a vote is only worth what the user's SP is. If this wasn't that way we'd see a lot more fake activity like on Reddit where 1 vote equals 1 vote which means there are shady services that people can buy 1000 votes on and pretend 1000 unique users have voted on a post.

But yeah, there's going to be all sorts of activity on a decentralized platform. My best advice is to let go and look forward to writing more posts and connect with likeminded people that appreciated reading your content.

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Yeah, seeing this topic has been coming up A LOT lately, it's certainly been informative to learn what the flagging system is designed to do and I agree with it whole-heartedly in principal. That said, as a very small fish the fact that you stand a good chance of getting your content squashed just for excercising that option means that the majority of minnows are never going to flag anything so the system doesn't really get integrated at the lower levels.

Hence the whole freak out when it actually starts being used. For the time being I guess it remains a way for bigger players to 'voice their displeasure'

I have not been flagged before so I really don't know the feeling but I know I won't be happy if someone reduces my payout. Flagging of posts should be an action that goes through a process and not as Instant as an upvote because they should be valid reasons why another blogger will want to flag another's post. That's my opinion on this, so people don't make flagging an act of retaliation.

Very informative post @acidyo

so people don't make flagging an act of retaliation.

Yeah, that's the worst kind of flagging and I really hate seeing that happen... A user with 1000 sp flagged a big user once and he went and flagged all the active posts of that minnow with like 100k sp..

What can you do. Right now there are not a lot of high SP users but with time and more eyes I'm sure things will get countered on a more fair basis in general and abusive flaggers will have a harder time while ruining their reputation.

That was really thought provoking. There are a lot of things to learn on this platform and even after 4 months of using it almost daily I still learn new things. Like the reasoning behind flagging, for example, was totally new to me. Imagine for a new user how alien these concepts might sound.
My humble opinion is that a video series + a written series describing in depth how the platform works would be hugely beneficial for new users and easy to point them to it.
Regarding SBD, I'm powering up everything I can possibly get my hands on, and I'm waiting for a dip in steem price so I can buy some more.
Cheers man!

Imagine for a new user how alien these concepts might sound.

Yeah a day or so ago I was talking to another "older" steemian about how much we've used the site and maybe come to a point where we can't even understand how difficult it must be for newcomers to grasp it.

@calatorulmiop : I was just listening to Minnow University, a show on @mspwaves (i think thats their tag?), and it sounds like they are getting ready to do just this. I agree with you that it would be wonderful especially for visual learners like me. If you dont know what I am talking about (or for new minnows reading this who may not have heard of it) MSP is the Minnow Support Project, and MSP Waves is their radio show on their Discord server. I don’t really know how to invite you to it though , lol, so just start-a-searchin’ in the search box! Ps @acidyo I have been here about three weeks and found your post very helpful and illuminating. I had no idea about the way flags worked exactly, either. And yes, the learning curve is steep, but I honestly find that part of the intrigue, too. I know that makes it harder for mass-appeal, but its kinda fun for researchy nerds like me . :) So I would never want it to be TOO easy. I think that the laberinthian quality is partly one of the strengths of Steemit.

The basics should be as easy as possible because we want as many people here as we can get. Also it's nice that someone is working on "tutorial" for new users.

I agree! I guess I was just speaking to the way exploration and discovery are a part of the ride here. I think the 101 entry level of Steemit could be vastly improved. I am just nerdy enough to have not been deterred by it. But I am planning to bring a bunch of people to the platform, and so far the best way I can think of to do it is to offer in-person meetups and trainings to help them get over that initial curve. Not everyone has that motivation to soak up so many details to gain access. So yes I understand!

I think flagging for disagreement of rewards is a bit of a two sided coin, as it can be used in a fair way depending on the situation. But, I think there's a lot of room for abuse there which I've seen in the past on here. I had a friend who writes stories on here which are excellent quality that he must put massive amounts of time into considering how many chapters he releases with them being thousands of words each. A whale got into a disagreement with him and flagged all of his posts for about a week so he was getting $0 for pretty much everything.

So, I'm really on the fence about how I feel on flagging users. Right now, I really only do it to spam comments. There are other times where if I see someone stealing content or plagiarizing it and they're making a big reward that I'll flag as well, and I think that is also fine. The system just needs some fine tuning to help alleviate the instances of abuse and I think it would be good to go.

that's a good example, the whale flagging the writer down regardless of the content. i've seen so much garbage content come through here (legitimately just copied and pasted from other sites or it's just a link to another site without any commentary) get high rewards while other users who create original content (or at least obviously create their own commentary) get dick for rewards. it's frustrating and it's part of the reason the site has lost its charm to me. great idea in concept, but like every other good thing, easily swayed and ruined by the greed or pettiness of others.

There is steamcleaners. You or anyone can turn to them and ask for help when you feel you have been targeted for total annihilation, or you feel they are retaliating against you, or if a reward dispute and their idea is not reward for you, they can, have and do take care of those situation and more. They are like steemit's little angels for a lot of rough times. And they do have enough power to fix things, and if they need more help, they can turn to @ned for additional help. I have yet to see a case where they did not have the ability (SP Power) to help someone.

Thanks for letting me know about that! I thought that account was specifically for trying to get rid of spam and plagiarism and that was it, so it's nice to know that they're around in case I ever have an issue in the future I know I have somewhere to turn to.

Somehow or other they sometimes have access to or a lot of pull with the adm account, and that can squash a lot of accounts. Yes They do handle excessive downvote of rewards issues also. I do not agree with everything they do, but they really are helpful in situations that are difficult to deal with otherwise. Through chat or their online fill-out form. and they will respond back, at least they did to myself and four others I sent their way to get issues resolved.

A whale got into a disagreement with him and flagged all of his posts for about a week so he was getting $0 for pretty much everything.

Yep, that's abuse and should be countered.

Yeah, but how can you counter it when it's one of the biggest users on the site exactly? When someone has voting power of 350-400k Steem it just kinda seems impossible to fight back against, even if you try asking other big users for help as most of them really probably couldn't give a shit.

@freezepeach will counter abusive flags to the best of their abilities.

It's what they do. It's all they do.

That's decentralization I guess.

What he's saying is that if you get flagged just smoke crack cocaine. That's the only solution, kids.

Fine! I'll just get my own crack! With hookers, and blackjack!

I don't even know why you bothered replying to this, I just felt like writing something ridiculous, lol.

But it have to be noticed, that even with some posts getting to 0, he still gets a pretty good reward.

Last time i checked, i his 9-10 days (dont remember wich one a checked) ago posts, he had some 0 posts, but still were able to get around 320,00 on rewards.

The other days he probably still get a pretty good amount, because 10 posts a day with $200,00 seems pretty hard to zero his total daily reward.

That's insane! I think this whale should give money back to the writer! We need a new function on Steemit- to ban for a week or two from posting. So people like that will think twice before to donw vote someone unfairly!

The whale rarely posts. He makes his money from selling votes, and self votes.

Can't hardly flag him. He comments sometimes, and that's an attack vector, but he's actually in a flagwar right now, and it's not stopping him.

I know. He's been flagging me too.

LOL

I don't care. It does me no harm, because I can't spend Steem. I just use it to upvote others.

=D

There is so many shit content. My flags do nothing.(( They are powerless. You are good or you are bad, you won't get problems from one upvote.

I find it hard not to take a downvote personally. In the strictest measure of the term, some is "judging" me and telling me that no only do they disagree with my post (which could easily be done by leaving a comment), but they are taking the extra step to "punish" me.

I have also been the victim of malicious down-voting. There was some poor chap who took offense that I had made derogatory statements toward Bitconnect, and proceeded to downvote all of my posts for an entire week. Fortunately he was less than a minnow so it had no effect, but had he been a dolphin or a whale, he could have made my life on Steem pure misery.

To say someone should not take it personally is easier said than done.

The worst part is seeing them spend most of their limited voting power only on themselves and not even reward commenters that are keeping their blogposts from looking like graveyards with full of cash in them.

Totally agree. I've seen a lot of shitposts from big-big-big fish. No quality, no communication with people that leave some thoughts under the post - just quantity and self votes... This is not the approach that can help Steemit to grow.

I am still newbie who is learning, so I did not know what is this "flag war" all about. Learn a lot from your post. Free market in the end determine the prices, although I believe that posts like "hate speech" should be flagged. Just my 2 cent opinion.

Its a free market so people are free to use the votes however they want to use it. Everything that the system allows is fair.

Just because something is allowed doesn't make it fair.

Here's the author rewards from just before HF19.

authorrewardchart.png

It's allowed, but it's not fair.

What's worse, is that is discourages folks who are not one of the 39 whales from contributing.

2017-11-24-LevelShares-EN.png

Just like the courts, legal =/= just.