An open letter to Steemit user @sneak - Steemit community please help right this wrong!

Originally posted as a comment to @sneak's blog in response to what I view as a gross misuse of flagging.

When I say "Steemit community please help right this wrong!" in the post title I am in no way calling for retaliation against @sneak - I am asking you to support the MAP27 Minnow Contest post that was downvoted by giving it some upvotes back.

EDIT - @sneak has replied to a previous comment asking about why the downvote on a MAP post. To summarize he believes this kind of post to be low value and stands by his flag. I don't agree (obviously - that is why I wrote what I hoped was a persuasive argument to the contrary, that the MAP posts do add value to Steemit) but at this point we are venturing into the territory of the subjective. @sneak is free to flag content he deems low value and the rest of the Steemit community is free to upvote it - I hope anyone reading this takes your upvote to the MAP27 Six of the Best contest post and spends it there instead of upvoting my post. As my post currently has a higher pending payout than the MAP27 post, and that was certainly not my intention in writing this post, I am pledging 100% of the SBD payout portion of this post to the other 5 contestants in MAP27.

Reposted Comment

Hi @sneak, I found you through your flag / downvote of the Minnow Accelerator Project's Six of the Best" MAP27 Minnow Contest.

I first made the logical assumption that you were an asshat troll, but then I noticed the 64 rep next to your name and took the time to look you up and see what you are about.

I am going to take you at your word in this post that you are genuinely interested in reducing the "noise" on Steemit and supporting meaningful content.

I believe there may be a misunderstanding here about what MAP is and what that contest post does - because the post you flagged definitely adds value to Steemit and helps reduce the noise, so you are working directly counter to your stated purpose.

First - how does MAP add value? The entire Minnow Accelerator Project is designed to help boost up minnows that are actually creating original content - the exact kind of minnows and minnow posts that are drowned out by the spam and upvote/resteem/follow/donation posts. Minnows throw their name in the hat as candidates for the current MAP 6 of the Best contest - @richarde looks through recent posts by each candidate and selects candidates who are posting original content. So the first and most obvious way the post you flagged adds value to the community is as a curation post. These 6 minnows featured in the post, of whom I am one, have selected some of their best recent work and submitted the links in the comments. By my quick count the six contestants have submitted between them, in the last week, 48 original posts. You have submitted, in the last month... two posts. Each contestant receives a 10% share of the payout for that post you flagged, so you are directly serving to discourage some promising new content creators, content creators who are not follow for follow spammers, who are not comment spammers, and who in fact are contributing quite a lot of good content and helping to reduce the "noise".

Second, the post serves as a cross-pollinator - each of the contestants brings their own followers to the post, and of course some are going to like another contestant's posts as well. I have already found several awesome Steemit users through this post - check out @theneohippy in particular, some of her posts are insanely detailed and well written - check out her pickle post man! I challenge you to walk away from that post not impressed with her content.

Finally the MAP also provides a community to continue supporting the minnow contestants after the contest is over, and of course one winner receives a 200 SP delegation for a week. To someone like you with $100,000+ in delegated SBD I am sure 200 SP seems like nothing - to me that would almost double my voting power, and with the minnows and minnow posts I am usually interacting with, it will allow me to bump deserving comments up to the top of posts for more exposure. I will put that 200SP to good use if I win, and I am sure all other contestants will as well.

And as for the community? In addition to running a dedicated MAP chat room, MAP encourages past participants to vote in the current contests and counts their votes towards determining the winner. This means that the minnow entrants in MAP get to interact with other users who were just in their same position. I have learned an immense amount about how Steemit works in my two months on platform - and a lot of that was in no way self-explanatory or obvious to a new user. I am happy to share my knowledge with even newbie-er users than myself, and will do so with future MAP contestants.

So I ask you sir - if you really mean what you said about working to reduce the noise on Steemit and supporting meaningful content - please remove your downvote. And if you have any shred of human decency, add a nice upvote as well.

I can tell you that for me personally, 1 SBD is a big deal - I just lost my job and we are saving everywhere we can. I paid for a 1 SBD upgoat from @minnowbooster to send to this contest post you downvoted, and I intended it as a show of support for all the awesome content creators (remember that all entrants receive a share of the post's earnings). To say that I was disheartened when I logged on this morning to see that despite me giving what was a very meaningful gift given my personal financial situation the contest post had actually lost money would be an understatement. Make things right dude.

Cheers - Carl