Captains log Hardfork 18
When did the flag wars begin? Why did Steemit decide to give everyone a weapon to impale their victims with?
Seeing men, women, and children being impaled by flags no longer provoked a reaction from me. It had become normal. We had become hypernormalised to throwing flags at each other, vainly believing it was a solution of sorts. But the flagging just beget more flagging. It's easy to draw lines in the sand when it comes to flagging, but I've seen a few too many posts callously targeted such as this funny comic which I made. After heroically making it to 15 cents the post was downvoted by abit and smooth because berniesanders had voted on it. His vote had been more than negated bringing my glorious 15 cents down to 1 cent. Berniesanders had had his vote negated and curation reward bonus missed out. Why are we allowing for a small minority to attempt to benefit us by flagging away other whales curation rewards?
I received 30 cents for this, and only 1 cent went to curation! The curators had been robbed. Berniesanders had been robbed, all because smooth and abit were targeting him. Why do we hurt each other?
It is in our nature to use flags. Flags are weapons. We plant them on the corpses of our enemies to gain their territory. The flag wars exist because we as a community find them exciting. Knowing our potential enemies are holding flags that can be weaponized activates our amgydala. We begin our decision making based on emotional reasoning, and then counterstrike before the enemy has a chance to flag us. An endless cycle of flagging. The flag wars... self correcting? Or a one way ticket to self-destruction?
I think I know why Steemit gave everyone a weapon. So we would escalate. I didn't want to be a whale before, but now I want the power to flag people to hell. I need that million SP. But for now we should build a spirit bomb for Steemit where everyone can delegate their steem power into a spirit bomb allowing for one user to totally destroy someone with a flag.
It's a game,...?
I bet they were voting engagement down, the list is in descending order of weight.
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I think we should have Fun with Flags instead of the war - need people to engage and comment their flag so we can see which great community we have.
https://steemit.com/positivity/@uwelang/no-to-flag-wars-but-yes-to-fun-with-flags-positivity-is-needed-it-seems
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Testing the flag war in practice... test... testing. :P
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It's a strange and delicate balance...
"Flags" are stupid because there's a 20-year web history associated with flagging being something used to report abusive, copied, spammed, plagiarized and spun content of dubious value. So when you flag someone, it immediately carries the connotation "your stuff is CRAP!" regardless of the underlying intent.
I think MUCH controversy and ill will could have been avoided, had "downvoting" been separate from "flagging."
Point 2: Active and effective peer curation is extremely important to the long time health and survival of a site such as Steemit. If we don't have an effective means of "sorting" (and rewarding) content by quality and perceived value added to the platform (and yes, I know those are subjective), this place can easily die an untimely death if a group of (typically "money for nothing seekers") came in and seriously tried to "game the system" for personal gain.
What do I mean? I have seen TOO MANY sites die from a flood of "This is my post, please upvote, comment and follow me, and I will do the same for you" posts have have ZERO purpose for even existing aside from to milk every possible cent from the rewards system. Of course, such an invasion causes all the real contributors to rebel and leave... usage drops to zero... end result, "goodbye and have a nice life." So we NEED curation tools...
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We need to separate down voting from flagging, imo.
Down voting one's stake in a platform is just using what is theirs how they see fit.
I don't think Steemit can make it without down voting, look how things were before these whales stopped that/those whale(s) from starving the minnows.
Imo, we just need to adjust our behavior to the pond, ie, no whale hogging of the rewards, and no abuse that harms those that don't have it coming.
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Laughed and liked it
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Thanks! ^_^
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I agree the flags are stupid, I rarely get anything much for my posts then the odd time one my my articles actually do make a nice bit $10 plus someone flags it cos they think it's earned too much, that's totally unfair and disheartening!
Maybe if we could have a flag only for members with plus 10M vests, but for us minnows it's so unfair to take rewards away from us! We try our best where the big fish just have big fish friends!
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To be fair, on busy.org they are not flags, but downvotes. Confusion will be inevitable. :)
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Down votes or flags... the label is really unimportant. The result is the same.
EDIT: If they make a down vote that has a different effect, and had a flag or report post type feature then the difference would matter. Since they do not then WHAT YOU CALL IT is really irrelevant. It is what it does and the perceptions it causes.
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Yea but the difference is people may perceive it differently by what it's called. They might not even know it works like it does and assume it's like on Reddit or something.
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Yep, I discussed that in the past too. Reddit has a down vote AND a REPORT POST button.
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Yea I know.
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We can call it a downvote bomb on busy.org
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