RE: Do not send sbd or steem to @randowale or @randomwhale
I asked them what I did, they didn't respond and then flagged my next post into the ground. So I went and flagged a post of theirs that was filled with plagiarism... then the attacks started happening, so I began blogging about it. The blogs were getting a great response to the censorship that was happening here on SteemIt from groups like that. Each one they would flag to pieces I would return with another one. In which they continued to just flag into the ground. I made two more blogs before I went to sleep that had nothing to do with "censorship". I woke up and my rank was a 7.7 and a ton of my content had been down voted so much that it had lost the money it had earned. They were just being bully trolls because they have power, and can get away with it because of the platform being decentralized.
This is, sadly, an example of exactly the problems I have been arguing need to be addressed in Steemit to enable it to reach it's potential.
I have repeatedly asked for any good reason for downvote/flag, except in cases of spam or plagiarism (either of those use cases can be met by community effort), and have not yet received - from anyone - a substantive answer.
You are not alone, unfortunately, and many new users aren't even aware this is possible. As awareness of this problem grows, Steemit will suffer, the price of Steem will suffer, and it's very survival as a platform will be in question.
Investors are perfectly able to profit from a growing Steemit platform from appreciation in the price of Steem alone, and the additional profit potential upvoting their own content provides not only degrades the quality of content on Steemit, but masks the negative impact on Steem price temporarily (perhaps long enough for them to extricate their investment before price crashes terminally).
I am sorry to hear this happened to you. Unless you have substantial followers, it may be better for you to simply start a new account that is unrelated to this one, as many in your situation have discovered such harassment continues into the foreseeable future.
I have actually had good engagement and help from people within steem.chat. There really are a great community of people on here, but until you have "clout" it's best for noobs to mind their business and just blog for the reason they came to SteemIt. The founders know of this issue and Im sure some changes will be implemented in the future. I've had help form steem chat and gained 6 points in rank yesterday back just from engaging in the chat rooms and putting out content. It sucks, but I don't want to have to start over when I already have accumulated over 40 followers in the less than 4 days I've been here.
Best of luck :)
That's awesome to hear, You're doing great
Check out my page and if you like my content give me a follow. I like to reciprocate to help out in the community!
Good! Keep calm and Steem on!