This will be a shorter post because I want to more so have a discussion than anything. Lately there has been a great deal of talks around bid bots use to get your posts trending, flagging abuse, and general negative sentiment to whales who are heavily flagging content that doesn't match their ideals, but is technically fine. This raises the question as to whether this is actually censorship free? Some whales have said they dislike cursing and pornography, so all the people who got censored on other platforms coming here to share can share, but they will be oppressed and their reputation harassed on here. It's not much of an improvement aside fro the transparency and ability to earn then.

We want STEEM and Steemit to last so we need to think long term. What is the easiest way to implement a system that can show that you dislike a post, without destroying someone's reputation? Well because whales are going around and enforcing their made up undocumented guidelines that no one is aware of it feels fairly oppressive.

Well isn't that basically what flags are? Technically yes, but it makes a lot of sense to have a native downvote feature to express distaste limited to a very small portion of your influence that is meant to show distaste without hurting someone's reputation greatly. This is also a great warning measure for people who are learning the "unspoken" rules.

Flags should 100% used on spam, scams, abuse, harassment , and posts that are overly boosted and earning way more than they should or trending content that is low quality. They shouldn't be used for enforcing personal private morals. This is what happened with the police with prohibition and the drug wars causing so much problems, segregation, and distrust between the people and state. SO, given that in this sense the state is more or less the whales and the witnesses, I think it's on you to either set a better example or work in some solution like this one. I think I've seen something like this before, but I figured I'd share my own take on it.

So yeah that's it, there wasn't much to this I just wanted to get this written out and see what everyone thinks moving forward. I've talking with people and several people have asked me to run as a witness so that is definitely something I am considering moving forward to help clean this up and provide solutions and get them into action. I think I would do a great job of better representing the values of the minnows in the politics of the STEEM blockchain which is only run by whales and witnesses. We are decentralized, but so we must take on the onus of having a safe, secure, open, fun, and fair community. If we allow the flag crisis to continue, it will paint a terrible picture of Steemit and STEEM as it becomes more main stream and come off as a scam to the average non-crypto user. We need to do this for the future of the platform and to have a productive and thriving community here. Steemit could be another failed hierarchical system of an amazing successor to social media on web 2.0.

Let's work together to make Steemit the standard, and make sure that it is still STEEMIT with the original ideals and values that were behind it's invention by the time we get there! Let me know what you think :)

Every time I post I select 1 random winner from the upvotes, resteems, and comments totaling 3 winners and give them 0.01 SBD each and announce it on the next post! I also send out 0.001 monthly to my followers! I use https://snackaholic.github.io/steemfortune/en/ by @snackaholic

The winners from the last post I made here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@scottcbusiness/what-s-with-this-weird-formatting-blogging-with-html

Were:
@treeplanter
@juanangel40bcn
@puroypoi

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