I only flag if it's real abuse, e.g. spam or a scam. If I disagree with a post then I'll generally ignore it.
I use Steemvoter to support certain people rather than to profit myself. I make very little from curation.
I don't really get how people profit from the bots. They generally have too little SP to make anything. Steemit was designed to counter this. Your voting influence is based on the square of your SP, so one person with 100SP has more influence than 10 bots with 10SP each. I may get 100 votes on a post, but I assume that most are bots. I'm more interested in the comments I get from people.
Yeah I'm the same as you @steevc. I only flag real abuse, such as spam, bot posting, or plagiarism.
I was also using steemvoter only for friends and long time supporters of my content, but I'm going to stay true to my word and have since removed my accounts. I've nothing against voting trails, only that they dilute the metrics of the platform. If you were to do the same on Facebook, and were caught, your account would be removed from the platform entirely.
The bots are more a long term thing, and for some it's about the idea of power. Unless each account has a nice amount of power, they're quite pointless in the short term. I imagine Steemit will solve the bot problem in time, especially if they want to create more value for the platform and its shareholders.
As always, thank you for your comment
I like that Steemit is policed by the community, so we get to decide what is allowed (mostly), although the real power is concentrated in a very few users. I think some people don't like to flag in case the person retaliates. You can report issues in the steemitabuse chat channel and others will deal with it.
I'm sticking with Steemvoter for now, but I may review who I vote for. Some of them are well established now and so don't really need me to vote on all their posts. I do a lot of manual voting too, but time is limited. I don't think it matters if you don't use up all available votes.
I think once we've reached mass adoption, around one million users, we'll see a more large stakeholders and more reward distribution. For now though, the concentration of power is just something we have to deal with as a community. As you said, you can always voice your argument in the abuse channels on steemit.chat.
Do your thing man. I don't want to dictate what someone else does. I think vote trails have their benefits, like @curie for example. Bots on the other hand, they can bugger off :'D
I agree about growth. Steemit is still pretty small with only a few active users. It will be quite different will a million. We can enjoy the benefits of being early adopters :)
I like the freedom Steemit gives us. I think we will see people develop add-ons to cater for different needs.
I am currently in the process of developing a new top layer for musicians. Something to look forward too in the near future :)