RE: A CENSORSHIP THREAT TO STEEMIT
I gave out my first flag in the year that I've been here two days ago. It was to a guy that was just spamming the 'new' feed with the same comment. I saw it a few times during the day and then he sent me the same comment on one of my posts. I checked his comments and he send out like 47 of the same comment in 30 minutes. I confronted him about it with the flag, he said he won't do it again. He hasn't posting any spam since so it might actually have worked. The flag was only the spam comment on my post, so if there was an option to control the comments on your own stuff, that would be great. Not that we should be able to censor those comments either (they should at least be visible on the blockchain still), but marking them as spam in some way is possible just like other sites.
But aside from that, I think there will certainly be accounts created to control the information that governments and large companies don't like. If a company doesn't blink an eye spending millions on advertising, they won't blink an eye spending a few million on a steemit account to block info that hurts their company.
Yes - up until now nobody on Steemit seems to realise how easy it would be for a company like fakebook to set up say 20 half million $ accounts to flag stuff they don't like.
Yeah, and how our platform would boom overnight because of the value, but how easy would it be to drain those account's voting power by spamming as well.
I don't know if spamming can drain accounts - is that what you are trying to do? How is that working out for you?
If they are autovoting or voting certain content negatively, spamming the content will drain their voting power, yes.
I only pointed out one way to negate all their effort with just one account, and granted they couldn't survive on reputation if they were to be autoflag bot accounts, because if they post content it could be flagged way down the line by anyone that sees the harm it is doing to the community (your evil whales), at any point, so they would only be affecting payout and not visibility or reputation, and even then, not going to stop anyone from speaking, and if someone stops because how their content is curated, or their account they hardly have a place on the internet or on a platform where people are free to speak their minds.
It's kinda odd that you have methodically avoided addressing the fact that the purpose of flagging is none other than to give people a way to police abusive and collusive self voting, which would be rampant otherwise (with a flag ban/upvote only) simply because people don't pass up guaranteed returns or free money.