Anyone who has followed me for a while will know that I support the @SteemFlagRewards initiative. I do this because abuse of the Steem platform is inevitable. People will see an opportunity to take rewards regardless of whether the community supports them. It may be slightly less of a problem since the hardforks reduced the incentive to sell votes, but we still have several accounts doing so with no apparent care as to how they are used. There are people buying votes for multiple posts each day that no human seems to look at judging by the lack of comments. There are other forms of abuse such as self-voting comments, plagiarism and generally spamming the platform that the group looks out for.
Those fighting the abuse risk retaliation and often put in considerable work into tracking down the abusers. SFR offers compensation via their SFR Token. You earn these for downvoting posts that have been confirmed as abusive. I think you need to be delegating to them to get the tokens as some would try to exploit the offer. You can exchange those tokens for a vote from the @SteemFlagRewards account. I tend to use these to reward others, but I think it is acceptable for people to get some compensation for their efforts. You do need to be whitelisted to use these votes, but then you just send some SFR to Steemflagrewards with the post URL in the memo using Steem Engine.
In order for this to work the @SteemFlagRewards account needs a decent amount of SP that can also be used to downvote the worst offenders. It has delegations from dozens of people. Not all of those will participate in downvoting from their own accounts, but they want to support the project.
Supporting a project like this carries some risk that someone would go after you, but the more of us who do it the harder it is to do damage to us all. It would be great to have more of the big projects supporting it as the SFR crew can help them out in finding those who try to abuse their generosity.
Please consider a delegation to the project to help in making Steem a better place to be. This is all about getting rewards to those who earn them. Some will say it is about attacking the little guys, but most of those who I see saying this have been guilty of some form of abuse. Steem is not a 'magic money mine' regardless of how desperate you are. If we allow the milking of rewards to continue without doing anything it will get much worse. I hear there are Facebook groups out there where people conspire on how they can make rewards for minimal effort.
You can set up a delegation using Steem World or various other services. Even 100 SP helps. I think you could get a small amount of SFR token just for doing that, but there may be some threshold on that.
Feel free to drop in on the SFR Discord if you want to discuss this at all.
I have a few people following my downvote trail to make use of their free downvotes. I do my best to ensure these go to genuine cases of abuse. Thanks to those who trust me on this.
Steem on!
