I've run across a user who has apparently made it his mission to try to flag posts just because he's having a bad time here. He happens to have 10MV, so since I have more, I can single handedly "remove" all of his flags. This is all well and good, but is this sustainable?
I got thinking about it and thought, "what if we could flag a user as well as a post?" Who's to say that one day, someone joins and gets something like 1000MV, only to act in this malicious way? It would take a lot of us to keep them at bay, and it would be around the clock work. What happens if dozens of large accounts appear and start doing this?
What if instead, we could actually flag a user? This flag wouldn't earn any potential money, but would still cost voting power to discourage abusing this feature. A meter would appear showing what percentage of Vests have flagged the user. Once, let's say, 50% of Vests flag the user, the user's account would be "locked" from voting. Maybe the cut off should be higher, I'm not sure. Perhaps 70-80% would be better to prevent potential, unlikely whale abuse. These flags would be with the account for the life of the account, unless the person who flagged the user changes their mind.
These users would still be able to interact with their Steem, Steem Power, and Steem Dollars, but would not be able to vote. They could also still post and reply, so that they can defend themselves. However, perhaps their reputation could get tied to this "vote lock" ensuring that they would have little incentive to try this tactic if they are in the wrong. By taking away their voting power and crippling their reputation, we are neutering them on the site, while not taking away their ability to access their funds or content.
@steemitblog mentioned revoking voting permissions and I wonder if they are already on to an idea like this, although it seemed it the post that this would be more of an optional function a user could enable/disable on their own account for various reasons.
Clearly there are users who will join this platform with the sole purpose of doing all they can to bring it down. I'd say that rather than fighting a never-ending battle against these users, let's ostracize them together as a community. The damage these type of actors do to user retention could really be huge in the long run and I feel that this could be a way to stop a really big potential problem before it gets out of hand.
In the meantime, try to read posts that are greyed out when the user has a new or above average reputation. Most likely they are being needlessly harassed. After reading the post and checking it out to make sure it's OK, upvote it to bring it to the light. If you don't have enough vote power, reach out to users like me and we can help.
I have no patience for people who want to hurt our experiment here with actions directly targeted against new users. I feel this may be a solution of sorts and just wanted to throw it out there in case I was on to something. Let me know what you think!
