RE: Bloomberg Technology Posts Follow-Up Article Focusing Upon Flag Wars

i think it's such a complex issue. i don't agree with the war, but i also don't see a bunch of whales using their SP any differently.

i think the thing that gets me is still that 50% of the power is in the hands of a few. i got on this platform incredibly hopeful that that wouldn't matter that much, but it does. it matters that so many are posting (and often, as you suggest!), but that 50% of the power isn't even using its 20% VP /day each day.

i know many whales are involved in initiatives, like curie, which share the VP in creative ways and boost many in the communities, but most of the whales seem unaccessible and disengaged. posting more will not solve that. we cannot change the whales and now they are out on a vigilante mission to smash "the troll"...

there may always be more trolls- are we going to have to do this over and over??

there is a systemic problem at steemit. the trending page points to this. the wealth distribution points to this (and i know in your posts the whales % is decreasing, but we still have a long way to go).

war is not the answer to systemic problems. we have to reach deeper and find ways to support one another and focus our energy on creation not destruction. i see more communities and hubs being an answer to this.

that the bloomberg follow-up focused on flag wars is likely a good thing. people should know what they're getting into. it's not a nirvana or an oasis. you have to hustle here and continually put out good content, most of which, especially in the beginning, makes little money. i've given this platform my all for the last 2.5 moths (as evidenced by the fact that i'm in the top 200 commenters, bots and humans together). i've posted 2-3 times/day on average, but we cannot change the whales and the way that they vote. i don't know the answer, but all of us posting more still wont change how they choose to distribute their votes.

Yes, there is no silver bullet for flag wars or vote abuse. Fagging actually returns the rewards to the reward pool, therefore, it is not that bad as it sounds. It is the necessary evil to fight some kinds of abuses. One of the things that can be done is that with "code" to make it less visible so that creativity is encoruaged not fighting. That's why trending page is not working since it shows all the limitations. Probably, hivemind/communities and SMTs will solve some of the problems. Within communities there will be some form of moderation, unhealthy behaviors will be contained within the community of the framework. Also, SMT will helpful in this case too. Here is a good post written by @andybets where he discussed how SMT can solve some of the vote abuses or flag wars

The distribution of the new tokens (SMT) will generally not follow the current Steem distribution, and this means that there will be different whales, dolphins and minnows in each community. It seems possible that in some cases the distribution of tokens might be so equal that such stratification isn't even relevant. Because in some communities it will be possible to vote on a single post with multiple SMTs, we will be able to declare token X as the reward token, and token Y as the promotion token for example. Then for example, a website could construct a 'trending' page based on the assignment of promotion tokens whilst reserving the reward tokens to pay developers for their work. If my understanding is correct, this could solve a big problem for Steem by eventually replacing the conflated Steem vote.