@steemflagrewards - Bringing Balance to the Steem Blockchain

The Steem Blockchain needs balance. For too long, getting upvotes, buying upvotes and voting was the main focus of the blockchain. We seem to have forgotten that all forms of consensus need balance, a counteracting force to keep it in check so it does not go too much in one direction. The ability to flag (downvote) is part of the protocol but is normally not used and when it is used, it is done maliciosly in many cases to punish a user, rather than contribute towards finding the "Proof of Brain" value of content.

Bitcoin protects it's blockchain via it's "Proof of Work" which requires users who want to decide where the block rewards go to spend some energy in mining. The Steem Blockchain gives that role to it's users who "mine" content by creating posts, upvoting and flagging.

Upvoters Get Rewards, Flaggers Make Sacrifices

The Steem Blockhains consensus protocol was skewed from day one towards upvoting while, those that saw content reach far above it's subjective value, could do very little.

Let's work through an example. Imagine a user that has a $1.00 upvote, if they vote on any content that is not their own after 30 minutes, they will earn $0.25 in curation as a minimum. If that user votes on their own content, they would earn $1.00 in rewards.

If that same user sees a post that has a $10 payout pending, which has been copied and pasted from the internet, or something that is just one line of text. They may reasonably believe that that post doesn't deserve the $10 payout and flag it. For doing so, the user uses up their voting power and in return earns nil / zero / nothing

In essence, the users who flag and reduce rewards for bad actors, leaving more rewards in the reward pool for other users are at a disadvantage.

To summarise, users have 3 choices

Self vote: 100% of vote as reward
Curate: 25% of vote as reward (with the potential of earning more if they vote early on a high payout post)
Flag: 0% as reward while using up their voting power

Bringing Balance

What if those users who went through the effort of identifying and flagging poor content got rewards?

That is what @steemflagrewards does. It crowd sources moderation of content on the blockchain and rewards those users who make a valid contribution.

Currently, each user who flags a valid post gets rewarded by way of an upvote on their comment.

So now our hypothetical user who had a $1.00 vote value can use that steem power to flag a post and earn $1.00 for using up their steem power on flags.

It is early days at the moment, but this project looks really promising. If you keep seeing lots of spam, plagiarism or other forms of abuse that are designed to increase rewards for the post creator while adding no value to anyone else, you can flag that post and earn rewards!

Give it a go today, lookup @steemflagrewards latest posts for details.

If you think more people should be aware of this great project, please resteem and spread the word!

@kabir88