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     8 years ago  

    The flag is as much a part of that system as the upvote is. I used to be annoyed by this use of the flag too but after when you consider that there is a budget to the rewards, and that this flag comes at an opportunity cost to the flagger who could have used the vote to gain a curation reward and the rewards just get redistributed to everyone else who was maybe only making a couple of cents for their work. Rather than repeat myself I'm going to copy and paste something from this post I wrote a month ago.

    When you find a post that you really value as a contribution to your steemit network do you give them your vote because you think it’s worth...

    1. the value of your vote
      or
    2. more than the value of the payout it has already acheived.

    Before I started asking myself this question, I was finding the voting behaviour of some of the whales questionable. I don't think I need to say what whales, I know that I'm not the only person who questioned this use of the flag.
    There were various arguments as to why the reasons for flagging were not good enough and I think a lot of people felt that the power of their vote had been negated which frustrates people as they find that they don't have even the little bit of power they thought they had.

    The reasons given for this behaviour is to further distribute the rewards around the steemit community. Since the reward pool is limited, when a post does extremely well, the funds for this reward get pulled from everybody else whose content is also worth rewarding for its valuable contribution. It is better for more of us to get a little than for a few of us to get a lot.
    What I hadn't realised, is that as the whales are competing for curation rewards, the use of a flag is at a cost to them. That vote could have been used for something that would reward them with $P but instead they choose to use it to further distribute the rewards to us. Believe it or not, it is really a selfless act when a whale uses a flag for the sake of making the platform more valuable to the rest of us.

    Is this post worth more than the value it has already achieved?
    What if we were all to ask ourselves the question above before we vote? Instead of just voting for something because you like it, but to actually consider a limit (say for example $500) to the amount any post is worth. Perhaps if you chose this number for yourself, and when reading a post that you liked that was above this number already (say $1000) you could keep your vote for somebody who needs it more.

    $0.00
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       8 years ago  

      I call bullshit on this whole idea that steemit rewards are limited. The number of steem coins each day is set, but the price of steem drives the number of steem dollars, which is what most of this is about. So, instead of being jealous, or judging whether the community has done the right thing with their votes, let's focus instead on spreading the idea of steem and get the price up. That's first, second, the same thing could be accomplished by moving the vote in a positive direction instead of shutting someone down whose work was seen as valuable by nearly all of the hundreds of comments on this post.