RE: All aboard, the @flagtrail

I'm playing this game long-term. I believe that Steem is just scratching the surface of its potential. We could rival Medium in a few years, if we play our cards right.

Some people think of steemit as a medium, some as a fb. I think it's a bit of both.

I've just checked your blog and wallet, saw your post about this initiative and your holdings. You've got a ton of sp and you can make a real difference. I'll be the last guy on Earth to tell you how to use your stake, but I'll invite you to think about the other approaches you can take and see if you can get more bang for your buck that way.

Fighting the abuse is not the best approach in my opinion, sure, there has to be some effort to combat the botnets since it can cause a lot of damage, but these hustlers trying to make $5 with $75 investment are not that big of a deal.

I see that you're aware of the problems this initiative can cause and that you've limited your flagging to 50k sp accounts. So, if I have 50.001 SP, I'm safe. The problem is the backlash. There's no way a person can not take the flagging as a personal attack because it's very easy to produce a 100 more shitposts of the same quality that are not being flagged. So, you either have to flag all of it or accept the fact that you'll have people holding your actions as a personal attack on them.

Steem has great potential, but so do have many other projects out there. Keeping people around, engaged and invested is much more important than going after the hustlers.

With that in mind, here's something that works. Two things:

Autovote lists - most people earn nothing here. Very few make any money and the upvotes & rewards are seen more as some game points than the real money. I can give you an example of a guy that with a fraction of your SP did a great job and his efforts have produced a vibrant community on steem that's alive and kicking for over a year now.
Here's how he did it. He'd look out for the new users that are posting under his niche tag, and if he saw a genuine account he'd add it to his upvote list. He'd start you with a small upvote and if your content started to improve that % would go up... A regular, even if worthless in the terms of $$$ upvote and the path forward has created a community and kept it going to this day.
dApps - Have you tried Actifit? Those posts do look ugly/spammy, but there are real people posting them and having some fun. That's the app that has an effect on people's lives in the real world. It motivated me to start walking, not because I'm earning $$$ from it, but because there's a community around it. It's fun, too. I see a friendly banter going on, people trying to outdo each other... That's the kind of thing that's worth supporting.

I guess, what I'm trying to say is that this game is about the people, not the content, having their attention and getting them to spend their time around here and not on some other project. God knows there are a ton of them out there, and that's why I think it's better to build up this place than to police it.

Many things to respond... let's see if I can reply to everything using one paragraph;

The way I measure whether I'm doing a good job decreasing VP abuse on Steem, is by how much SP that is held by abusers is powered down.
A 50K limit is fairly arbitrary. Just to avoid a situation that I'm at war with 6 Orcas, which can together bundle up and mitigate everything I do. Whether I'm flagging 10 people with 10K SP each, or 50 with a combined SP of 75K isn't the point. How many of them cease operations is the only metric that matters.(again, how much SP is powered down and sold, regardless of how many people actually held it).
If I'm being diligent about who (or more accurately which posts) I flag, it doesn't matter whether the flagee refuses to understand that it isn't personal. I can explain why the flag was placed on his post. But if his too stubborn, I'm not going to be his therapist.

Regarding engagement, both are (almost) equally important. You can't have a good social network without a large user base. But you also can't have a large user base if not enough rewards are available for great content creators (we're not really built for FB like activity, but let's just agree to disagree how much Steem is like FB and how much like medium). And why do I think that abusers affect the available rewards that much? Well, because they are. Take a look at this chart from from July 2018, to April 2019, SFR had responded to over 13,500(!!!) instances of abuse. And that's only for those they CAUGHT, 13,500+ upvotes that took rewards from content creators that actually care about the future of our platform, and instead rewarded users that see Steem as nothing more as a cash cow.

This ecosystem needs both curators (those who focus on upvoting quality posts), and abuse fighters (those who try to make the curators VP worth more), those are two sides of the same hammer. You need both for the platform to thrive.

And don't get me started on the risk of the abusers being able to overpower everyone else... we'll be slaves if that happens. And STEEM will rapidly move towards 0.00000001BTC

So basically, curators distribute the rewards, but abuse fighters make sure they actually have enough rewards to distribute

#CleanSTEEM