Let's Have a Discussion on: Self Voting and Flagging

HF19 did what many predicted it would: brought with it an increase in self voting.

It's become common for users to frequently spam rather empty comments at posts, every two minutes even, and self voting them, even to a dollar or two. It adds up to quite the rewards after a while.

Now, on one hand I'm of the opinion that you are allowed to use your stake however you see fit, and on the other hand this kind of spamming adds no value to the platform and I think it's worth frowning upon.

Recently, I flagged a user - no reason to name names, he can join in on the conversation if he wants - who has been a prominent spammer and self voter, and politely warned him that I will be flagging his spam if he keeps it up.

As expected, this was taken very personally, accompanied with a slight rage fit about how he's never done anything to me. He later deleted his comments.

This made me think about the psychology of flagging on Steemit, and made me realize that with the recent increase in new users, this is as good a time as any to have a community discussion about the subject.

Ideally, the flag, or rather the downvote, would not be anything personal; simply a distribution tool, exactly like the upvote. Some posts we feel deserve more rewards, while others deserve less.

Payouts on Steemit are subject to community approval, and the final payout is the result of a consensus.

On Steemit, users get really attached to their potential payouts, and we feel that they have deserved them, due to getting upvotes. But at the same time, the downvote is no different than an upvote, and since users can use their stake to allocate resources to a post, they should be allowed to allocate resources out of a post.

It's the same thing, just in reverse.

The definite downside of flagging is increased drama. People simply do not react well to being flagged. It leads to rant posts, flag wars, whining, all the stuff we've seen on Steemit since the beginning. And those of us that have been here longer have seen quite a lot of this stuff.

But I don't think we should avoid using what is a fundamental part of the platform in the fear of drama - and on top of that, I don't think we should tolerate the drama, period.

The whole psychology revolving the issue needs to change.

A good first step would be to make a GUI change where the flag is finally changed to a downvote. But that alone won't fix the issue.

I said at the beginning that if you have the stake, you're allowed to use it. And if you choose to use it to self upvote your spam comments, fine. But the rest of the community has stake, too, and it's their equal right to flag what they view as worthless spam on the blockchain. No reason to take it personally.

But what say you?

I'd like a community conversation about this right now. New users are increasing, and I, for one, would not like to see any more spam on the platform than there already is, and there's quite a lot of it, unfortunately.

Let's have a conversation in the comments!