The most of them consider flagging as something that bad people do, but it's not like that. Flags are here, available to all of us to use, only a few clicks stand between you and someone getting flagged by you. It is our responsibility to keep this platform friendly and positive, we have a few different tools for that. A flag is one of them. Now, I don't say that you should watch for every detail and flag people around the whole day and enjoy it. I don't even say that you should waste your voting power on 100% flags. Flags are not here to harm someone, there are here to warn the others and help them. The most of us can do nothing harmful by flagging someone, those flags are more symbolic and you can just place the flag to show that you noticed something inappropriate and rude, or people who abuse tags and those who get more rewards than they deserve. Let's say few things about reasons for flagging.
When you're about to flag someone, this is the message that you will get:
Flagging a post can remove rewards and make this material less visible. Some common reasons to flag>
Disagreement on rewards
Fraud or Plagiarism
Hate Speech or Internet Trolling
Intentional miss-categorized content or Spam
This is a kinda personal reason, depends on your opinion, there is no general opinion for what is good content and what is bad content. Flagging someone because of that won't get you anywhere. You won't harm the user, you won't EDUCATE the user by your flag. So avoid to flag people because of this reason, you won't achieve anything with that, you can only make people give revenge flags to you.
Do not hesitate to flag someone when you are sure that you found a plagiarised or a false content. It's your duty to protect the community.
The same as a category before, please flag hate speech when you find it! Worn the community on bad behavior, it's also one of your duties here.
And finally, the most common flagging reason for me. I hate phishing comments in which shameless people invite me to visit their blog and to upvote them, especially if I noticed that they praise my content but they are very lazy to give an upvote. So I will defend my post from this kind of things, but I will not dare to defend and your post, that's up to you. This category covers and tag abuse. This is a special problem on this platform, you will see that if you open newly generated posts under #steemit tag. Then you see that those posts say nothing about Steemit. Those posts also deserve flags, but this kind of flags will not have any effects. You can flag as much as you want, but people will still use #steemit tag for photos, stories, and pieces of information that have nothing with Steemit.
