Each user can use their own stake for whatever they like even if it is to upvote themselves. You on the other hand can use your flag to counteract what they are doing. Just flag it and move on.
The majority of people's flags are worthless, they'd have no effect
swaying change, at the most would just start a flag war that wouldn't much benefit themselves either. How well would someone like me fair flagging someone who habitually upvotes their own content....if they have enough sp to up vote their own content they have enough sp to have a serious effect on my account if they flag me back out of revenge. It's absurd how they even came up with that ridiculous way to stop abuse when the majority of people don't have the power it would take to spontaneously stop abuse in it's tracks.
You have exactly the amount of influence as the stake that you hold. That sets it up so that those who have the most to risk (large stakeholders) have the ability to use their stake. Until we get past the flag wars and normalize flagging the abuse will continue to grow. I flag people larger than me often. I have only been revenge flagged a couple of times.
Hint.. Leave Bernie and Haejin alone. I haven't seen much damage done by revenge flagging after that. Even both of them stop.
If you think someone deserves a flag for bad behavior and you don't give the flag, out of fear, that is also greed, just in a different form.
I admit I like to read the Haejin and Bernie war threads but I know better then to become directly involved on those threads. I made a comment to someone once who said time to get out the popcorn and I commented on a Bernie post the other day that was going positively well without any flagging but other than that I hear yeah.
I beg to differ that if someone doesn't flag abuse it's greed, it's not greed, there's nothing there to be greedy about. It's the difficulty of bandwidth, the small amount of money involved is meaningless. There's much better ways to report abuse, you can do it through discord or I will usually make a note to point it out to the markymark for him to check out. I send other people his way to if I see them wondering about something going down. He is much better equipped to handle these situations.
Heck yeah, I like to read their wars too! :)
I also agree if it is bot abuse themarkymark is the way to go.
smaller accounts can and should flag comment spam and whatever they see as shit posts from other small users though.