I joined in January and am yet to find content that I would downvote. Not that my vote is worth much. I took a couple of hits in the voting experiment by some whales. Fun times. :)
I have considered flagging for things like porn clips and pics. It is not that I am a prude but I don't think it is worthy of even the few cents that it gets as far as content. For me, I would like to see Steemit be a community of content creators and supporters of content creators. Hopefully, content will make the money go around too and attract users.
If the people posting porn are starring in the porn, shot the porn, are the model in the photo or took the photo of the model themselves, I will be the first to give them an upvote as they would be content creators. If they reposted it from Tumblr. They probably don't qualify.
But, I haven't downvoted these people yet either.
When I joined I read some advice on how to get some followers and votes going my way which was basically: Good content, engage.
Most of my content is of a fair quality generally (my opinion) and I definitely can do a better job at engaging with a wider range of users. I tend to wait until people comment with valuable comments and then engage with them. I find, that in this way, the people are more often interested in my content or helping me improve my thinking. These are often the people I track back to their blog and find that their content gives me new perspectives and helps me grow in unexpected ways.
This has worked well so far and led me to some great authors with little work on my part and they in turn have led me to more. By doing this though, and staying away from 'trending', I get a skewed perspective of Steemit since most of what I see is from quality content providers. When I scroll a few hundred in the 'new' section, I quickly realise this is not a realistic view.
I tend to ramble, so on to flagging. It seems at an increasing rate, there are comments on some of my posts whether long form or photos that make a short and somewhat related comment to my work and then a link to check out theirs. I have no problem with this approach. I have only done it a couple times in the five months myself, but I understand it.
Out of courtesy for their effort and time to consider my work and an attempt to engage, I follow the link. However, on the other side, I find some poor quality (So far, it hasn't been porn, but it won't be long probably), random post or something that has been grabbed from the net with a few lines of hurriedly typed text attached.
Quality is in the eye of the beholder, I know this well but, in the past when I have come across this and have done this occasionally, the content linked is likely to be of interest to me based on the content of the post, related directly to the post itself or something that adds to the conversation in some way.
It is like very poor AI on a commerce website. We saw that you were just looking at bathroom light fittings, would you like to buy a bowling ball? or, you just purchased a book on World War 2 history, other people who have bought this item also bought, Justin Bieber extended DVD + 4 colour click pen + slinky.
I am loathe to actually downvote someone but this is more annoying than 'Follow for follow' people because they are easy to ignore. I actually feel I should click the link and see just in case it is a great author laying in wait on the other side. I worry though that if I continue this, it will increase in occurrence and I will stop following the links and miss the opportunity to find worthy authors. I will just ignore. (Real quality comments are hard to ignore though).
I am not one to downvote bad content and I can even find value in bad content but I don't want to only be greeted by it. The advice was 'Good content and Engage'. It is a two-parter that should probably not be separated and if one does risk separation, the first part is more important than the second. I understand I am not always going to find content I am interested in but still, isn't there some etiquette?
I could leave a comment but I feel that they are playing a spam numbers game anyway so wouldn't care. I don't even know if this is a viable reason to flag. Maybe for now since it isn't such a big problem, I just have to keep clicking through and crossing my fingers it is not a waste of bandwidth and is actually someone awesome waiting to be upvoted with my 3 cents.
By the way, for the older people and more 'free software' inclined, does anyone remember a warez site with a link that said 'more cracks here'? If you clicked through you would remember as once seen, it cannot be unseen.
I dread the day that starts happening here.
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]