RE: Appropriate to Flag a Ponzi scheme?
As someone who hangs out in the mining subsection often... a significant portion of the content are all affiliate link related (whether its a Ponzi scheme or not) and its quite frustrating to not hit the flag button... Consider carefully about voicing your concerns politely in a reply, with some references. I recently had an interaction of the sort with respect to some posted reports of profit from some BTC/realestate thing (see my reply history if you're interested) - and upon preparing this reply, I went to go look at it, the original post was flagged and hidden, whether the information and concerns I presented were an influence on this, I cannot be certain. And the arguments about downvoting, animosity caused, and censorship are quite complex it seems, and as to my feelings about affiliate programs in general are not necessarily the most pertinent for this particular thread (do discuss any further) - so I'll leave them out :3.
With that said, I'm still an ultra nub on Steemit - but from my observation/reading the general population appears to generally be not to into it. However, remember that it takes people to go against the grain (or at least talk about it for thing to change sometimes).
P.S. That was a giant run on sentence there amoungst a whole bunch of other things :3, sorry!
I agree - it's not an easy decision to make. I feel like part of being a good curator is to make it clear that programs designed to take advantage of people do not gain traction - but as someone very new here I'm honestly concerned about the potential backlash.
I kind of think this this curation system is kind of messed up, some portion of it seems to have some unpleasant popularity contest/snowball effect hints. Though with that said a good chunk of worthwhile posts make it through. May considering only upvoting what you like - unless you want to make money, then just play the game like everyone else does. Unfortunately it appears that voting strategies that optimize profit and ones that maximize quality of content are mutually exclusive. Though I assume there is a medium somewhere (clearly, many of the bloggers here who are popular make great content and deserve upvotes.)