Steem Pope Short Sermon: Flags

There is a time for upvotes, and a time for flags. Upvote original content that meets your quality standards and piques your interest. That's easy. The only difficulty is the number of votes one can make in a day before one's vote power and resource credits drop too far. Flags complicate matters, but they are also an essential tool to curate content on Steemit. Flags are limited like upvotes. How should they be used? The text below is quoted from the dialog box that opens when the flag is selected on a post or comment.

Flagging a post can remove rewards and make this material less visible. Some common reasons to flag

• Disagreement on rewards
• Fraud or Plagiarism
• Hate Speech or Internet Trolling
• Intentional miss-categorized content or Spam

Let's look at these point-by-point.

• Use of bid bots and vote farming results in unearned rewards to the detriment of everyone else in a zero-sum reward pool game. It is perfectly valid to flag people who bought their earnings using bid bots. Some care must be taken to make a distinction between such abuse and curation trails or auto-vote systems, but a quick look at the names and profiles of voters on posts with strange reward pattersn quickly reveals what's really going on.

• It is fraudulent and dishonest to use these services, just like it's fraudulent and dishonest to buy votes in a political contest, if you'll allow me to don the minarchist dunce cap for the sake of an analogy. there are other fraudulent schemes out there, too, so apply your critical thinking skills to any posts that make offers that seem too good to be true, or include embedded links to sites that spoof Steemit in order to phish your credentials and steal your account information. As for plagiarism, see my previous post, How to Share Content Responsibly.

• Hate speech, trolling, and otherwise-abusive language is usually readily apparent. Some spammers and plagiarists can't tell the difference between criticism of their behavior and personal insults, but I trust the majority of Steemians don't need an explanation here.

• Posts and comments created for the sole purpose of buying votes are spam. Plagiarism is spam. Using tags that don't relate to your post content in an effort to get attention is spam. Posting a dozen times a day with brief quotes, copy/pasted content, or even just a string of photos you took in an effort to maximize your post count constitutes spam. There used to be a reward reduction if you posted more than four times a day to dis-incentivize spam, but it was removed in a prior fork. It's still a good measurement, though. Four different posts of quality original content is a lot of work. Put that kind of work into your posts, and you're far more likely to gain an organic audience of readers. Spam tends to get flags instead.

Flags help us curate the blockchain just as much as upvotes. It is a way to remove the incentives for unethical and immoral actions. If we all work to flag dishonest and abusive posts or comments, we will build a better platform. It's like picking up roadside litter: it isn't fun, but it needs to be done.