Flagging trending posts only to get Steem-related posts on trending feels like a bad idea...
However, nothing with HF21 (so far) according to me is to bring in new people. It looks like the "safest" way to keep the investors happy... And maybe, at HF23, we'll see something that is done for the lesser accounts, and we can start to on board new people.
I won't be flagging much either, because truth to be told, I don't see how it would benefit anyone else besides the large- and established accounts.
I also face the risk of retaliation flags, so my downvotes would ultimately free up some tiny extra rewards for large accounts to earn, and I could end up with less than I already have... And what I have been able to earn has already decreased.
I don't have any stats for it, but it also looks like upvotes on comments have decreased, which is basically the exact opposite of what we should do, in case we are trying to encourage people to engage.
Nah, I was skeptical before HF21, and I am still skeptical. I still can't see how any of this would help Steem in general. Looks like the perfect HF to make the rich even richer though, but to an even greater expense of lesser accounts.
Indeed. Now you have to flag if you want to use all your voting power and get the reward potential from your account each day because part of the upvoting power relative to a reward pool has been diverted to flagging. If you flag those posts on trending to get your rewards for flagging each day, then people with more SP might flag you back on your posts. You might get rewards for flagging, but lose for for being flagged on a post. Meanwhile, those with lots of SP can flag without much worry of retaliation. And the less everyone else flags, the more the higher SP holders flags reward them (just like if only they were upvoting, they would get all the curation rewards).
hold on, rewind.......
are you saying if we flag, we get a portion of the rewards removed, do all the rewards not go back to the rewards pool?
I think what he's saying is that no matter what you flag, the portion of the rewards that are removed go back into the rewards pool – but odds are that the person that you flag has other posts awaiting vote payout, so in theory you are rewarding everything else that the person that you flag has written or produced that isn't that specific thing that you have flagged.
I would go a step further and point out that when you flag something, you are literally taking the rewards that you have control of from the reward pool and giving them to literally everybody else – including every bad actor that you couldn't catch or didn't have the SP to do anything about.
This is one of the core problems with the entire idea of downvoting as a means of community management that I have been talking about for quite a while. It doesn't matter how much SP you have if you are literally just rewarding every other wrongdoer or bad piece of content anytime you flag something. Ultimately you're just making your life harder because your rewarding more things that you don't want then you are hurting things that you don't want.
In theory, you're also rewarding things that you do want but odds are good that the vast bulk of contents on the blockchain is stuff you either don't care about and thus don't want to reward or stuff that you don't want and thus don't want to reward, and only a narrow slice of it is stuff that you like and want to reward.
Upvotes are far more focused and useful tools than downvotes have ever been.