RE: Is this a place for creative people? What can be done about the tyrants on Steemit?
Thanks for the comment, but you're reaching. My comments are directed at a single individual. I am not indiscriminately flagging people simply because they comment on his posts. I'm not using an army of bots or considerable voting power in a way that reduces the Steem market cap while enriching myself.
Every flag is deflationary. It removes "proof-of-brain" from the blockchain. It shrinks the economy. This is not to say that some flags are not justifiable, but using them as a political instrument is not.
It does this in two ways... it effectively deletes author and curation rewards that would have otherwise gone into circulation, and the voting power wasted on flagging could've been used to upvote quality content and bring new author and curation rewards into existence.
What's worse is he is making a lot of money doing it. His (-18) reputation was granted to him by Dan Larimer (@dan), the founding engineer of the Steem blockchain. He dubbed him the "Bad Whale."
I've done a lot of digging on http://steem.supply. I suggest you have a look at his account. ;)
As far as I know, the flags are not removing anything from the blockchain or reducing the economy in total. It harms the potential economy of a single user, but not in total. As far as I understand, there is only a certain amount of Steem created constantly and while someone loses their potential rewards due to flagging, it will be seen as a slight increase in the potential payout of others.
I usually avoid flagging and I'm hoping to do it for right reasons, but we are different and as all of us have the power to flag, I personally don't say I can determine why others are flagging some other users.
Flagging is not really bringing any loads of money to him, not at least directly. I can't see him and his flagging as harmful for platform, as more harmful are whales upvoting themselves to use their SP only on themselves, like some users are doing. That's in their power, though.
He is making hundreds of dollars a day on his main account alone just from posting the same comment over and over again, and for bashing people left and right. He can be seen calling someone a "fucking retard" simply because he feels like their post is a conspiracy theory, and the flags the rewards for into oblivion.
Also... he does this to many people, and they don't have to be guilty of anything other than commenting on the post of someone he disagrees with or posting on a subject he doesn't like. There is a reason his reputation is (-17)... looks like it just came up from (-18) today. The only reason he has any power here is because he was an early adopter and probably has some technical skills.
He doesn't demonstrate the maturity of someone who should have the sort of authority he's granted himself.