When I first came onto steemit, I right away felt like this place was a home of sorts. I posted my introduceyourself post and people responded kindly. Welcoming me to the fold. Of course being in a treatment facility for drugs and Alcohol and having to live with a bunch of people who were at varying degrees of recovery, age, and maturity. I fell in love with this place we all call steemit.
I have been on steemit almost 3 months now and feel I am getting the hang of it, people are reading my posts, I have grown in leaps and bounds as a writer, but most of all. I have made Friends and to tell you the truth without them I would not be here

The steemit community is the glue which holds everything together. Without us, and growth there is no steemit or value to steemit.

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So, Just recently I have been apprised to this thing called a "Flagging War" which essentially is, to the uninitiated. Someone who comes under attack by a group of larger steemians who downvote their posts and comments and them.. to destroy them.

At first, I was like..why? I thought we are all here for basically the same reason and we all would play fairly. Unfortunately this is not the utopia I once thought it was. Now, don't get me wrong Steemit is an absolutely amazing idea, site, that makes you money for valued content.

See, I used the word valued Content, that is part of the reason these wars are taking place. Ok, let me break this down nice and easy for everyone.

You have Good Whales and Bad Whales.

• A good Whale is one who upvotes content made by others to add value to the platform through i.e: teaching people new things that are useful, helping someone in need, learning about how to use steemit and it subsidiary apps, and bringing in new people or something that is just plain well written and interesting. OK so far? Good.
• Now a bad Whale from my estimation is someone who makes extra accounts that are bots using them to vote with, and empty comment, crappy post about nothing, No value. The old Upvote for everyone here post if you do this, this and this. but adding nothing to the platform itself. You see by doing everything that only rewards themselves, bot accounts, and crap comments, thus emptying the reward pool which hurts steemit as a whole. i.e: YOU AND ME
  

Flagging Wars

So, what happens is the Good Whales get together and use there VP ( Voting Power) to hamper the efforts of these people who are only self interested, by destroying their reputation which get their posts of everyone's radar and thus saving the reward pool and having be used for what it was always supposed to be used for upvoting good content

So, you end up basically in a battle of self interest over preservation of the integrity of the blockchain, which is good for me and you.

because if you don't know already **there is only so much reward to go around, and thus it should "go around to the people putting in their times, effort and money sometimes to make steemit more successful and bring in more people to the site and carry the retention rate.

Steemit is a social news service[2] which runs a blogging and social networking website on top of a blockchain database, known as Steem. The service produces STEEM and Steem Dollars which are tradeable tokens users obtain for posting, discovering, and commenting on interesting content.
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So I would say that in the interest of steemit being a success and the price of steem increasing we must as a community be good citizens and not play into these get steem quick schemes they only serve to build the whale and drain the reward pool. remember you only have so much useful Voting Power each day. So use it wisely friends.

There are some real good upvoting bots like Minnowbooster where you get a return on sbd spent and a few more good ones.

Remember my fellow steem citizens, only we can make a success out of steemit and the way we assure its success is through the vote. Use them wisely, Upvote interesting content on things you like, not just to earn .001 sbd that is senseless. Use Steemit to sharpen your own writing, video,music, art, photograpghy, blogging or whatever in post form and earn sbd/steem the way its founder Dan Larimer initially conceptualized it to be earned. Follow those who are doing good, go on discord make friends. Get better at it, and one day you will be up there too. There is a saying and I will leave you with this: If it is too good to be true, it probably is.

Kindly and Honestly,

Friends in Steem.