Great coverage of the rewards side of flagging.
The other big issue is censorship.
If a drug company sets up a Steemit account with say a six million $ wallet and starts censoring posts about vaccinations - are you OK with that?
And if Goldman Sachs come along next week with a wallet containing 666 million $ (pocket change for an investment bank) and censor everything they disagree with about crypto curries - which might include just totally trashing Steemit - are you cool with that too?
You are so wise! Believe me it has definitely crossed my mind with all the unkind words thrown my way that those throwing insults and calling me names are paid by the pharmaceutical company to harass people who are against forced vaccinations. It has also been suggested that the big whale who is at the top of the comments on my post must be a major stockholder in BIG PHARMA.
After all it is common knowledge that George Soros funded Black Lives Matter to create division and dissent.
I upvoted your comment too bad I can't resteem it.
No posts are censored on the Steem blockchain mind you. Steem is censorship resistant. So assuming a drug company is silly enough to plunge millions of Dollars to buy Steem (Moon!!), they'll only be a whale. downvote all they want, the only damage is a $0 pending payout and a collapsed post. Which can still be viewed if the readers want to.
not making money off a post isn't "being censored". So why be afraid of censorship?
I think making a post go grey so it looks like spam and nobody sees it is censorship. And taking all the rewards from posts that you disagree with is also censorship.
Both of which are happening to posts that expose the evil truth about vaccinations. It's already happening with just one or two small whales doing it.
What would Moby Dick do?
The BitConnect article flagging was pretty big a few months ago. It seemed to only affect people who weren't whales.
If they wanted to they could buy enough stake to vote themselves to witnesses. So, stake will rule, it just depends on who owns the stake.
We are all here on a volentary basis.