Minnows - pick your fights with caution or not at all
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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This post received a 4.1% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @gmuxx! For more information, click here!
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