Hi @spectrumecons! Always good to hear your thoughts.

I think we have quite an anti-downvoting culture. I think the setup on Steemit creates the impression that flagging is a malicious act.

The funny thing is we are way better off than say a platform like WhaleShares and their what I would call the flagaphobic culture. i want to create a Bart Simpson writing on chalkboard "Flags are not violence" meme just for them.

They have set themselves up for failure with a "Promote the Good. Ignore the bad" mentality. In my estimation, there are not too many problems that are solved by ignoring them but guess they will need to learn.

In an analogous sense, it's like not paying mind to the people robbing the 🏦 and focusing on "doing good". You leave the abusers alone for long enough undeterred and they will just grow in relative influence compared to their more altruistic counterparts.

My overall assessment of their abuse fighting posture is one indicative of a naivete of human nature and possibly coupled with incompetence. Think their existence is to give potential investors the warm and fuzzies while the bad guys siphon as much as possible from their reward pool as possible.

There is one account @iamtraveler on there that is continuously copy pasting YT links and self voting them many times a day. What did they do? A shout out from their "WhaleGuardians" that did not deter them. I sure sent a few costly flags.

They cost 3x as much as upvotes which is a huge problem. I don't know how that story is going to end but I have sounded the 🎺 so to speak. I am glad to offer our services to other chains provided they are willing but they were not. At least not at this time.

I should write a post about my experience as a warning to Steemians that are considering "jumping ship". We have moderation that is functional albeit underpowered. Yes, flags are abused sometimes by certain characters but, in the grand scheme, they are one of the best tools we have against reward leeches adding nothing to our ecosystem.

The culture here has been coming which may be, in part, due to price action. Folks don't like seeing their investments dwindle and we are in what I would like to call the golden age of abuse fighting which @utopian-io spearheaded through their AntiAbuse project.

Just today, I have added another innovation to our bot to allow moderators to batch approve follow flags on a parent comment greatly reducing the administrative burden to free up attention to the constantly evolving abuse on our chain.

This is pretty much a hobby for me. Comes with a fair share of drama but I sure as hell can't say it's not interesting. Lol

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