RE: BULLYING ON STEEM , PLEASE READ , IMPORTANT
You are keeping me busy today! I love it! Fully agree that human interaction is completely possible in the absence of actual physical contact. I believe we have had several such interactions ourselves! I would love to hear more about Planet Lud, I have a lot of respect for Luddites although I am a hopeless tech head myself. RE this particular internet squabble, I want to mention that I don't necessarily condone some of @toneyboney's responses to @michelle.gent, but more importantly to me, I felt that they arose out of a reaction to an unjustified flagging and I can certainly understand this generating some anger. I personally try to never do anything in anger, preferring to wait until I cool down and re-evaluate, and at that point taking any necessary action in a spirit of calmness... but I don't hold other people to this code of conduct and realize that anger and angry reactions are a normal human thing.
RE this particular flag, I agree with the general principle of flagging posts/comments that are nothing but a beg for upvotes/follows/resteems without adding content... but I disagree that this applied to @toneyboney's post. He has a funny way with words and I found the flagged post amusing and to me it qualified as original content. I ran into Toney when he left a relevant and original reply to a song I posted, and I was curious why he had such a low rep when he was obviously capable of genuine human interaction.
RE a new user group for Minnows - I do not know which particular group you are referring to, but I would personally highly recommend the Minnow Support Project (MSP) and the associated PAL (Peace Abundance and Liberty) chat on Discord chat. If you are curious, @juliakponsford's illustrated step-by-step tutorial on joining MSP is great, although you really only have to follow the tutorial up to the point of registering your account with the MSP bots (the following Steemvoter steps are not necessary) and Julia is a peach as well (really terrific supporter and curator of the arts here on Steemit, check out her curation posts and contest posts if you have not already).
If you join MSP you gain access to an upvote service that you can use twice a day (once every 12 hours maximum) - you can use this to upvote other people's posts or your own, you use the upvote service by visiting the #upvote channel in PAL Discord chat (the invite to join the chat is one of the first steps of the tutorial) and (ONLY IN THE #UPVOTE CHANNEL) typing the command
$upvote POSTURL
Where "POSTURL" is the full URL of the post you are trying to upvote.
There is no hidden agenda in MSP - no requirements made of members, absolutely no wiff of censorship. As someone who is enjoying browsing around on Steemit but has very little Steem power yourself, joining this community would give you the ability to give a nice little upvote bump to deserving posts you encounter.
Cheers - Carl