What’s the hottest thing on Steemit right now? Flag Wars – it is so hot, you don’t want to touch it. Both sides flag each other, both claiming they are right, both are unhappy about current situation and nether want to stop. There is only one solution to our problem: no more flags.

How are flags misused?

1. Flagging someone who doesn’t “deserve” that much money
   Why they don’t deserve it? According to who? How much should be their post worth? Why your subjective opinion should be objective rule?
2. Flagging for revenge
   It is surly not the intended use.
3. Flagging for getting upvotes from bots
   How do you know that a bot upvoted the content? It might be as well done by a person that is just sharing his account with a bot. What if somebody else paid for the bot’s upvote? What if somebody would pay a bot to upvote you? What if a person upvotes you because you paid him or he likes you rather than liking the article?
4. Flagging worthless content
   Isn’t it the right use of flags? No. If the content is not worth it, nobody will upvote it. You might not see the value in posting @haejin’s graph analysis but somebody else might be interested in it. You might not see value in posting movie trailers that they didn’t created themselves, but then you don’t see the editorial value because the person picks only those trailers that are interesting for his followers.

Bots on both sides upvote garbage content all day. Steemit is in deep trouble. Few raised their voices and their flags and decided to clean the platform... others flagged back and the platform turned into a giant mess. But one developer just wrote a post how to bring back peace between human and bots on Steemit...

What is the purpose of flags?

1. Stop spam
   Nobody wants to see off-topic advertising, repeated posts, comments copied from someone else.
2. Stop plagiarism
   If you post work of others, they are the one that should get the reward. But don’t go too far since in some cases it makes sense to do a work of editor by selecting materials to post work of others like move trailers which are specially made for a purpose of sharing rather than profiting of their creation.

Author’s editorial rights

Author should be able to moderate comment section under his article, but flags are not the right method. There should be two options – you ether choose to see author’s moderated section or uncensored section with all comments.

Flagless Steemit – is it possible?

Yes, it is possible without flags. We need only shareable personal blacklists to filter authors we consider not worthy reading, spammers and so on. When you log on, you will not see articles and comments of those people. Shareability is important property so that a user can say that he will use a blacklist of someone he trusts plus his own. It should lead to creation of few levels of blacklist from high filtering to low or none. Over time spammers and low-quality authors will understand that being on most people’s blacklist severely limits their opportunities and their effort is just wasted.
So… let’s remove flags.

Examples of Flag Wars

First contentious issue is bid bots. @GrumpyCat believes that bid bots that allow bidding on articles older than 3.5 days old is wrong because he believes it is too late to payout day and so it isn’t done for promotional purposes and he believes that late promotion by bid bots helps only spammers and therefore he flags anyone who uses those bots. Few others with @Drakos flag him back, they believe that his approach is wrong because he missuses flags to hurt others that have done nothing wrong a probably even didn’t know about GrumpyCat’s conditions. @r351574nc3 even created bot @the-resistance that upvotes people flagged by @GrumpyCat and flag him.
Second battle is between @haejin and @berniesanders. @haejin creates lot of trading analysis, he upvotes mostly just himself and @berniesanders considers this behavior wrong and that is why they flag each other. Lot of other accounts also participate on both side of the conflict.

Let’s make peace

Let’s make a week without flags. Why? Because it only hurts Steemit. Consider this: If you are a good author, would you join a platform that on one sides it promises you to make money for quality articles and on the other you can easily become casualty in Flag Wars and lose all you worked for so hard to earn? And if you are a new reader, you hardly wish to read about conflicts of few users but when you look at trending page, you will find plenty about that.
Let’s make peace for a week until May 25th and see if things get better. Let’s consider the points the other side is making and change our behavior a little bit so that after the week we can still live without flags.

Value of whales

Nobody seems to understand that owning lot of STEEM is also good thing that should be rewarded because all of us are paid in STEEM (STEEM DOLLAR OR STEEM POWER). The payouts under the articles don’t appear from nowhere, it is – through inflation of about 10 % annually – removed from all STEEM holders.