the witnesses are seemingly not concerned with this. i dont get it. asking nicely for him to stop is laughable. he's not breaking any rules, really, so the only recourse we have is downvoting, but the system is totally flawed because there is no real incentive to downvote. And it takes too much to get the value all the way back down - not to mention that these posts can just go unnoticed.
I'm extremely bullish on steem in general but i am pretty surprised that this type of abuse, along with many others, is not being addressed at all. i would give all my witness votes to anyone who would deal with this, but i'm just a little guy...
It's not an easy fix. It requires a lot of new ideas and consensus on changing rules in the game.
As things stand now, should a whale or witness have to personally spend all his voting power on miscreants simply because he has more voting power than you do? Should that be considered fair simply because he has a good following? How much of his time should be spent on monitoring and trying to control others instead of creating and curating? Is it fair that he has less time to have fun in the community that he has helped to build and is a part of?
I not certain that someone with a lot of voting power should be blamed as 'not caring' or 'not concerned' even if their interference can (only to some degree) help others feel justified and secure about the rampant crime. Changes need to be made but not just to individual players.
You've got 30 possible votes for witnesses. Start doing the research, go to their sites and start voting the people who will make a difference
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
I agree. I truly believe Steemit has a place in the future and I expect that Steem will grow exponentially, but these fights and cheap workarounds make me worry that new users will be reluctant to delve into a platform with so much volatility.
Just give incentive to flagging (getting a part of the canceled reward) and have the witnesses double checking each reward.
problem is that 100 witnesses cant check that volume of rewards, it's not even close to feasible. As it is, they don't even have to check steem most of the time, just keep their node running. I do agree that there has to be some kind of moderation, whether by witnesses or something similar, but it would have to be at the user level (i.e., reporting users for abusive behavior to have them banned/punished or whatever) instead of at the post/comment level.
or double the witnesses and have a second layer of witnesses for large rewards
Imagine successful flagging being rewarded by giving the flagger a portion of the rewards that get canceled because of a flagged topic.