Blacklisted and Back Again

So this was an exciting and troubling week for me on the ol' blockchain. A few months ago, I started following the @insteem trail on Steemauto. At the time, I was more of an active participant in that community.

As time passed, and I got busy and depressed, I stopped being an active participant. I would still hashtag certain posts with their hashtag, but that was more a matter of habit than anything else. It's been a long time since I got an upvote from them. But I stayed on the trail.

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That turned out to have been a mistake.

On Wednesday, I got flagged by @mack-bot. I had no idea why at the time. Turns out, it was for one of several upvotes I sent with the Insteem trail to what is termed a "comment farm." I don't know why the Insteem account voted for those comments, more than 15 votes over 7 days. I reached out to the site's founder on discord, but have not gotten a reply.

Fortunately, a friend interceded on my behalf and got it straightened out. But I will say I found the process both intimidating and confusing. On @mack-bot's profile, it says to contact the bot's creator, @patrice, if you feel you've been flagged in error. It does not say where. Apparently, the answer is Discord. But I had no idea. I sent a memo with my question. I never got a reply. I also never got the downvotes cancelled.

As I wrote in my original post about the flagging, I have tremendous respect for the work @patrice does in cleaning up the blockchain. And I realize than in dealing with the volume of output we have here, you're gonna have false positives. I made a mistake a few months ago, which led to a flag this week. That's on me. But I do think the process of having a recourse should be clearer.

My friend who helped me get the issue sorted is much more active in the community than I am. She knew how to take care of the issue. I am grateful to her. But I feel it should have been simpler for me to take care of it myself. Getting downvoted for every post and every comment is scary. It was the first time I ever considered quitting the blockchain.

If you've been similarly affected, I would suggest turning to the relevant channel on the Steemcleaners discord server. There are channels there for appeals for Cheetah, Mack-bot, and spaminator.