After signing up a new Steemian he was egger to get immersed in the creative art of content creation. He made a few posts, and lately when strolling round the Communities, he stumbled stumbled across some sketch work and got attracted by the amount of votes the Sketch work attracted, so he went into sketching, and posted a sketched work of his own.
His sketch work prayed our with $0.02, unlike the $84.64 that attracted him. He was both confused and disappointed. So he asked why.
I have had a similar experience, I looked at the drowning and said to myself, if this unfinished sketch work could fetch this much, I can sketch my way here on steemit, I could snap the sky and make $95.23 out of it.
Needless telling you how disappointed I was with result of the sketch and sky picture I posted. So I did a little bit of digging and the words that came out was bot/vote buying.
The abuse of bots results in low quality posts accumulating numerus votes and syphoning rewards due for Steemians who have put in their best to share high quality content on the platform. It has resulted in a situation that discourages creativity and hard work.

Up Vote, Down Vote or Flag

Like the thumbs up - thumbs down feature found on most social media platforms, the steemit platform has an Up Vote and a Down Vote feature with an additional feature called flag.
While the up vote feature is used to curate contents that conforms with the ideals of steemit.
The down vote and flag features are were meant to be used to indicate that a post is found wanting in one way or the other.
Down Voting is a request sent to the Blockchain, indicating that a post is not deserving of the reward it has accrued, and should be striped of such rewards because they are guilty of plagiarism or the post is a spam without any true value.
The effect of a down vote is directly proportional to the steem power of the down voting account. The higher the Steem power, the higher the effect.

The Down Vote Trail

Steemians who frown against the abuse of bead bots for the purpose of enriching spam, plagiarized and low quality posts join hands together to empower a down vote trail.
A down vote trail is a collection of Steem power to be used in striping spam and Plagiarized posts of the rewards they might have accrued from the miss use of bots and other forms of abuse on the steemit platform.

How to join the trail

Step 1:

Click here to join the down vote trail.

Then Click on the Log in with Steem Login button

Step 2:

Now select the continue button

Step 3:

Enter your Username and posting key

Step 4:

The process now needs your Active key, so you will have to click on the continue button.

Step 5:

Enter your Username and your active key

Step 6:

Authorize the use of your active key

Step 7:

Login to make settings

Step 8:

Apply the following settings.
-Down Voting can go on as long as the voting power is above 0
-You can use my up vote power if I run out of down vote and my up vote power is up to 100.
-only Downvote a post st that has >0
Select the Save Settings

Step 9:

-Scroll down
-Make sure trail is selected
-Enter ac-cheetah trail
-Add

Step 10:

With this you and I can help keep steemit free from abuses