During these past few days several members of the #minnowsupportproject have been victimized by other users with a much higher SP in retaliation for flagging plagiarised content or for simply asking reasonable questions regarding a questionable endeavor. Their posts have been decreased in value and hidden due to poor ratings. Luckily the minnow support project and it's resident whales and dolphins rallied to their defence and reinstated these posts and increased their values.
We know the flagging system is being abused. Someone once claimed they had 'accidentally' flagged a comment of mine. Of course this is nonsense as when you hit the little flag button this comes up, describing what the feature is to be used for and you have to confirm you really meant to do it.
What this should show minnows is the importance of either picking your fights with caution or keep your head low and avoid the flak altogether. You have little SP to defend yourself against these attacks by unscrupulous users. I fully understand your frustration at seeing questionable content and can sympathise with the righteous indignation you feel when you put your heart and soul into your work, only to see others flaunt the Steemit guidelines.
If your flag attacker has much more power than you, also maybe having a second account with which to back them up, they can wipe your posts from visibility. Eventually your reputation will go down and once that is gone it is very hard to crawl your way back from.
I implore you to use caution and to instead bring these matters to the attention of steemit-abuse in Steemit chat or any dolphin/whale friends you may have. Do not do anything publically, don't draw attention to yourself. It is hard enough to make it here without having to deal with such nonsense.
It may look cowardly to some but think of it as a survival tactic: if you were a rabbit in the wild would you chase down a fox?
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Great points. I've been doing this, and I'm not even a minnow anymore.
"What this should show minnows is the importance of either picking your fights with caution or keep your head low and avoid the flak altogether. "
I strongly recommend that minnows simply avoid any post they would feel the need to flag or make negative comments on. It's too easy for them to be abused, and too satisfying for the abuser.
You need the threat of a powerful downvote to force others to consider retaliation in their game-theoretical analysis of whether they should downvote you. You don't have this as a minnow, so even if the shining light of truth and reason is on your side, all it takes is someone emotional with some SP and two clicks.
Avoid topics and authors that trigger you, unless you are able to debate them in a reasoned and intellectual manner that makes you look better and them look worse. Note: this is very difficult to do consistently and most of us are unable to restrain emotion well enough to come out looking the clear victor in most cases. This is a high risk strategy, but sometimes, you will see your follower number shoot up as you appear to be the reasonable one in a debate with some ranting lunatic. (I have used this strategy on SJW/feminist posts, as well as the articles kyriacos posts that are full of factual falsehoods such as "The Star Trek Federation most closely resembles North Korea, politically".)
Yes, there is a lot of power play going on here and we sometimes forget that not everybody thinks and acts as rationally as we would like to think we do. Exercise caution
Great advice! Thank you!
My related content on this topic:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@chelsea88/do-we-really-have-to-worry-about-asshole-whales-killing-our-rep-because-they-don-t-like-us
Fully understood.
Nice one Gmuxx... I have been noticing so many posts are just a sentence and then someone else's youtube video.. If it's NOT your video... Don't put it up !! RESTEEMED buddy !!
Thank you. Best for now to just let them fly and hope someone else higher up take care of it
Dont mess with the trolls and stay quite seems like OK survival plan for an individual minnow, but as a community we should not be quite at all. We should react and smash these trolls who can really cause lot of problems in a long run to whole Steemit.
How to stop them? Maybe SP should not be the only thing that gives you influence inside Steemit. Combination with reputation and maybe to enable an option FLAG THE TROLL, some kind of Steemians public court that will remove the influence from a troll who is abusing a system with his SP.
This is my point. Don't go up against them on your own. If there is questionable content get some backing behind you or point the right eyes towards it.
Or we can just mass flag them back, imagine if even half the people from this "minnow support" project retaliate and flag the troll back, we can wipe them from existence too. Since the voting power has been linearized, we can still inflict significant damage with ~1000 sp, imagine 100 flags (yes, that's a bit far fetched at the moment, but all it takes is some cooperation and awareness). I'm guessing even if the number of flags won't be enough to wipe out payout to 0, it can still destroy a whale's reputation
This is true but then you inflame things. Do we really want a flag war?
How else will one prevent harassment of minnows?
Don't forget if the flagging is reasonable, it's not a "flag war". Even some whales might join in if it means prevention of SP abuse
That is a hope but for now it might be best to keep a low profile, don't invite such a situation
Sure. Fully appreciate your efforts here though
Fully agree, well said
Thank you @paulag
Sad to see this posting, it is like trolls from yt, not many safe from their hatred.
It is sad to see
As you say, it's hard when you want to make sure something that is wrong is made right. However, I don't yet have the power to make those kinds of fights my own.
Good advice and well said.
Thank you
Thank you very much for this bit of advise!!
My pleasure, I hope it helps
Good advice sir. I didnt even know I could flag until a few days ago when I noticed all this crap going on. I guess I just don't go looking for it. Thanks for the read.
My pleasure
Resteemed. Just a shame this has to occur.
Thank you, very true
😖 seems to be one in every crowd.
The rabbit and fox analogy is golden. Great post.
Thank you my lovely
GMuxx back at it again with the survival tactics!! Thanks for looking out for us minnows <3
My pleasure, thanks
I just made a post about this. Basically can some aashole whale who just doesn't like us can destroy us? I thought flags were reviewed?
Yes, you can be destroyed on a whim. It doubt the flags are reviewed from my experience
You doubt it, but they're supposed to be reviewed, no?
No idea, it doesn't look like it to me
Ignore bad posts and they will go away, without response or feedback, positive or negative, they will fade.
The same goes for new posters too, if you ignore them they will fade, feed them knowledge, greet them at the introduce yourself page, teach them something, give them pointers, nurture as you wish you were nurtured.
There is a lot of talk about supporting minnows, but the red fish who will never make it to minnow status are lost opportunities, disillusioned they may never return, losing out on hard earned gains.
Steem on, great post @GMuxx, thank you for your hard work and dedication to the community.
Thank you
Solid advice as always my friend. Best for everyone to be careful. Even this system still has bugs to work out of it.
Thank you
Why can't everyone just play nicely it would be so much better. Cheers mike
People being people don't always think rationally
Maybe not, cheers
WOW
Yes, much wow. It has become quite serious
I see this too ...
I almost never bother with a "flag" unless something is either blatantly illegal or the person posting has shown a total disregard to the value of the community.
Usually, I'll comment on copyright abuse, comment spamming, and shitposts. I won't outright say "Don't do this" and I'll never be insulting or mean. My comment is pretty much always structured in a positive way with suggestions for creating material of great value that will help the poster become a valuable part of our community.
I will also point them at any one of many blog posts I've written about abuse, and creating value in response to the flood of low quality crap. These posts were my way of helping other minnows (and the community in general) begin to become a stream of quality content.
Unfortunately we tend to forget that not everybody is as level headed as we like to think we are and can take advice as criticism and think it is an attack.
Internet trolls are everywhere, why would Steemit be any different? This is something that we all have to take a stand against but it is important to choose when, just as @gmuxx describes, good advice!
Thank you.
I'm not sure what the solution to this should be but clearly the system as it stands does not work
You're doing God's work man. Hope you become a whale someday.. And take care of your MS
Well thank you. Just trying to help advise where I can. I hate seeing the little guy/gal getting attacked like this
so sad to see here @gmuxx, awesome to see the community rallying around them...minnows UNITE!
There is power in the collective. We Are Borg
Resteemed to share with everyone.
I have seen what you speak of, and it is disheartening to ask a valid question and get attacked, almost like don't ask the government any questions or your going to be sorry.
Well I'm glad you posted this, thanks.
Thank you
That's pretty messed up that you can basically ruin somebody's account with flagging without any type of review. Once Steemit gets really popular that's going to be a disaster.
It should really be looked at
Did you mean to use a David v Goliath image?
Because David ended up winning that fight against a larger opponent...
I did but David had a mighty slingshot full of SP so he was cool standing up to the big guy ;-)
Actually discovered this today, an interesting rethinking of David v Goliath from Malcom Gladwell:
https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath
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Still learning the ropes here. Found this post informative and interesting enough to grab my attention (not very easy to do these days to be honest).