Minnows - pick your fights with caution or not at all
During these past few days several members of the #minnowsupportproject have been victimized by other users with a much higher SP in retaliation for flagging plagiarised content or for simply asking reasonable questions regarding a questionable endeavor. Their posts have been decreased in value and hidden due to poor ratings. Luckily the minnow support project and it's resident whales and dolphins rallied to their defence and reinstated these posts and increased their values.
We know the flagging system is being abused. Someone once claimed they had 'accidentally' flagged a comment of mine. Of course this is nonsense as when you hit the little flag button this comes up, describing what the feature is to be used for and you have to confirm you really meant to do it.
What this should show minnows is the importance of either picking your fights with caution or keep your head low and avoid the flak altogether. You have little SP to defend yourself against these attacks by unscrupulous users. I fully understand your frustration at seeing questionable content and can sympathise with the righteous indignation you feel when you put your heart and soul into your work, only to see others flaunt the Steemit guidelines.
If your flag attacker has much more power than you, also maybe having a second account with which to back them up, they can wipe your posts from visibility. Eventually your reputation will go down and once that is gone it is very hard to crawl your way back from.
I implore you to use caution and to instead bring these matters to the attention of steemit-abuse in Steemit chat or any dolphin/whale friends you may have. Do not do anything publically, don't draw attention to yourself. It is hard enough to make it here without having to deal with such nonsense.
It may look cowardly to some but think of it as a survival tactic: if you were a rabbit in the wild would you chase down a fox?
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Great points. I've been doing this, and I'm not even a minnow anymore.
"What this should show minnows is the importance of either picking your fights with caution or keep your head low and avoid the flak altogether. "
I strongly recommend that minnows simply avoid any post they would feel the need to flag or make negative comments on. It's too easy for them to be abused, and too satisfying for the abuser.
You need the threat of a powerful downvote to force others to consider retaliation in their game-theoretical analysis of whether they should downvote you. You don't have this as a minnow, so even if the shining light of truth and reason is on your side, all it takes is someone emotional with some SP and two clicks.
Avoid topics and authors that trigger you, unless you are able to debate them in a reasoned and intellectual manner that makes you look better and them look worse. Note: this is very difficult to do consistently and most of us are unable to restrain emotion well enough to come out looking the clear victor in most cases. This is a high risk strategy, but sometimes, you will see your follower number shoot up as you appear to be the reasonable one in a debate with some ranting lunatic. (I have used this strategy on SJW/feminist posts, as well as the articles kyriacos posts that are full of factual falsehoods such as "The Star Trek Federation most closely resembles North Korea, politically".)
Yes, there is a lot of power play going on here and we sometimes forget that not everybody thinks and acts as rationally as we would like to think we do. Exercise caution
Great advice! Thank you!
My related content on this topic:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@chelsea88/do-we-really-have-to-worry-about-asshole-whales-killing-our-rep-because-they-don-t-like-us
Solid advice as always my friend. Best for everyone to be careful. Even this system still has bugs to work out of it.
Thank you
Sad to see this posting, it is like trolls from yt, not many safe from their hatred.
It is sad to see
As you say, it's hard when you want to make sure something that is wrong is made right. However, I don't yet have the power to make those kinds of fights my own.
Good advice and well said.
Thank you
Thank you very much for this bit of advise!!
My pleasure, I hope it helps
Good advice sir. I didnt even know I could flag until a few days ago when I noticed all this crap going on. I guess I just don't go looking for it. Thanks for the read.
My pleasure
Resteemed. Just a shame this has to occur.
Thank you, very true
😖 seems to be one in every crowd.
The rabbit and fox analogy is golden. Great post.
Thank you my lovely