With Hard fork 21, downvoting has its own bandwidth now. I hate to see my VP sit at 100% but I was lucky to find a group of Steem users working together, minnows, dolphins, orcas and a few whales using their collective voting power to stop spam and low quality content from being rewarded on the blockchain.
Many wonder why Steem has dropped so much in price, to me its just Bitcoins movements affecting altcoins due to BTC dominance. But theres more than just that when it comes to Steem. As some users have found ways to abuse the payout system by self upvoting using massive leases, use of bid bots on low quality posts. Or even groups of Steem bots working together to raise the price of a post. The group of Steem users trying to stop this is Steemflagrewards. Steem Cleaners has been around a long time, just like @mackbot and @cheetah helping to keep the blockchain clean and free of junk. I remember when Steem was in the top 30 altcoins, and I have a feeling that the abuse on the chain may have been the cause for the drop from rank 30 to all the way up in the 80s and 90s.
Now there are communities working together to find more content that should be zeroed out and at the very least warned of what they are doing. Stopping this abusive drain on Steem being sold on exchanges. Stopping their reward before the payout date.
I joined the group about a month ago and have been keeping my downvote VP busy. And brought on as a member of the Steemflagrewards group.
Members of the Steemflagrewards group will submit posts and users they find abusing the payout system and members of the group are free to downvote the posts if they agree with the abuse.
Messages are left on the abusers account letting them know why they are being downvoted.
Its not always met with positive results. Sometimes these are retaliatory downvotes, ive received one so far.
Out of the dozens of users ive downvoted. It only occurred once and the user is now not using bid bots and last I checked not self upvoting their posts. And only their posts at a 96% self-upvote ratio.
By allowing these users to get away with abusing bid bots and self upvoting only their posts. Usually the abusers take their earnings and send it off to Bittrex to cash out. Which lowers the price, if there are hundreds of users or thousands of users abusing this. The price of Steem will continue to drop. And as someone with stake in this system I do not want to see that happen.
Just a few sentences and then uses bid bots to upvote, every day.
More trash using a bunch of tags to earn tokens, the same goes for Steem-Engine payouts, if they cash out these coins it will lower the price of tokens if they can get away with it.
I powered up some more to hand out more downvotes, along with upvotes to good content.
In the past, downvoting had no rewards to it. And just cost you voting power you could otherwise use for upvotes. But after Hark Fork 21 it is now possible to really put that downvoting power to use.
By joining Steemflagrewards, and downvoting #flag-targets you will earn SFR (Steem Flag Rewards) tokens. And also get an upvote from the @steemflagrewards account.
By submitting users and posts for consideration of downvotes you will earn a bounty. So you dont even need to do the downvoting, just "curating posts for downvotes" so to say...
I could upvote my posts, and add 30 cents to my posts, but id rather spread out that vote to others that will instead return the favor. To help out the @steemflagrewards account I also delegated 2000 SP to the account to help have more downvoting power.
Besides helping to stop abusers from being rewarded, by joining the Discord group there is collection of great Steem users are on there. Many with great content, and if you have good content as well they may recognize that and help your posts out if you do the same in return.
In the last month, I have also seen a steady rise in the price of Steem along with its rank slowly improving. I think the downvoting is having an effect on the price of Steem.
Or at least it seems to be that way, with accounts like @ocdb and @acidyo, and @themarkymark joining in and dozens of minnows, dolphins and orcas I think we can all make a meaningful change to the rewards system in the Steem ecosystem. Looking forward to any of my followers that join the Discord, you will be met with a warm welcome and it feels good to be part of a community working together to protect Steem and its value. Steem has such a great underlying structure, we cannot allow it to be abused by spammers and other low quality users. As long as I hold my stake, I plan on downvoting content I find wasteful on the reward pool and would love to see others doing the same. So we can all help raise the price of Steem.
Addresses below to help me buy better camera equipment and support me to travel to locations to do photo and video and overall great blogs in new places. I would be happy to list some of the contributors in my posts for donations that help me along the way.
Coin
Address
bc1qhfmvd2gywg4fvrgy2kkkkyqta0g86whkt7j8r7
ltc1qdyzm5cwgt8e2373prx67yye6y9ewk0l8jf3ys9
XkSqR5DxQL3wy4kNbjqDbgbMYNih3a7ZcM
0x045f409dAe14338669730078201888636B047DC3
DSoekC21AKSZHAcV9vqR8yYefrh8XcX92Z
znW9mh62WDSCeBXxnVLCETMx59Ho446HJgq
