The grand Flag Wars that never came

Hard Fork 21 brought us the cultural change for the community to govern itself with the free downvotes, which brings changes to the flow of stake to reflect more people's honest opinions. What I find interesting is that I have witnessed even some prominent Steemian getting quite triggered over a flag which makes me think that the entitlement over reward pool is not always present just among the small fish.

The flag took out only a fraction out of the total pending rewards, including other posts, so I wonder what's the reason for getting so emotional over it.

I have made great losses because of decreasing value of Steem, so I deserve rewards

So has everyone else, and if you feel the loss is too big to handle, you have broken the first rule of investing: never invest more you can afford to lose. Investing comes with risk, and that is something one has to live with, the loss argument in itself is not a valid reason for getting author rewards.

Perhaps the person really deserves all the rewards and has helped the price not to crash further by holding all the Steem Power. But then again, why get angry? Now that people are voting with more honesty that reflects their private preferences, why are you scared to trust the wisdom of the crowd? If you are such a good community member, then people will come back you up.

Before the Hard Fork, many users were afraid of flag wars, and some claim, that even now there is a war.

I disagree.

What we have now is public negotiation over rewards. People who interpret a single downvote as a declaration of war are like veterans who come back from Afghanistan: all they see is war, because that's all they knew of during their service, and are now taking it back to home, being paranoid about any potential threat in civil life. Those users are stuck in #oldsteem and haven't moved on.

In #oldsteem, flags were often a sign of personal attack – because the motivation to downvote someone had to be greater than the loss of personal gains. Not many were altruistic enough to downvote with the cost of personal loss, hence one of the few big enough motivators for downvoting was revenge and the satisfaction from the drama associated with these actions.

#newsteem though, has completely changed the motive for downvoting, because no more is there a direct cost for it in the form of reduced voting power, therefore decreasing curation rewards. The motive for downvoting now is to cut the flow of stake from users with malicious activities, shifting it more towards authors who deserve it. And who deserves and what, is not put up to a wall like the Ten Commandments – that is a centralized form of guidelines – but is decided in a decentralized manner where every individual each votes based on their own individual opinion. Stop looking for a leader or a gang to decide for you, look around, discuss and make your own decisions.

What this change in motivational factors has done, is that despite every user now having 2.5 free disposable flags per day, the amount of retaliatory votes is considerably low compared to the promised gloom of "grand flagwars". What people didn't take into account, was the change of incentives. When people realize that instead of focusing on personal attacks, and downvotes providing a way to protect their investment, flagwars suddenly lose their appeal. It goes to show how dysfunctional Steem used to be when downvotes used to be cast to create drama.

@haejin might have been abusive in his behavior, but he isn't stupid; now that he is zeroing on his automated posts that he uses all of his voting power, it clearly isn't the ideal strategy because he is zeroing on author and curation rewards and not growing his stake. The Economical Improvement Proposal has resulted with a complete u-turn in behavior where even the likes as @berniesanders is no longer trolling, but curating, and our most famous technical analyst, @haejin, is stopping his self-milking strategies – so far he has kept his word with stopping his automated posts with the latest one being 2 days old already.

Time for #newhaejin? We'll see what he comes up with, but in any case, haejin changing his ways seems like another bullish sign to me. How many more do we need? :)