Steemit is a platform that reaches worldwide, giving us a great mixture of cultures. While most of the time, this is seen as a good thing, offering us long reaching connections and the opportunity to learn a huge diversity, I think sometimes we can forget that the ideals of someone from a different culture can clash with our own. In a situation like this we can choose to agree to disagree and move on if we aren't happy with their methods, try to learn to understand why their ways clash with ours or we can start a fight.
I'm not going to beat about the bush, I think most of us know the big fight going on here that is on my mind. I don't even want to get involved, but I can only see this repeating itself over and over if we can't learn how to walk the footsteps of another or just accept that sometimes we will disagree.
Imagine, if you will, that the target in question is from a regime that has taught people not to trust their fellow man for fear of imprisonment or worse; like the Chinese during the Mao period maybe. They might be of a very proud culture who values honour and protects their family fiercely, but trusts no-one outside of it. They would probably be used to restrictions which either physically don't allow certain actions or there is a very obvious penalty for certain actions. They may also be used to making the most of what you can get, while you can get it, because you never know when things are going to change and that chance is gone.
Now imagine that they are on Steemit and within the limits of the site they have found a way with the support of a trusted other to make a lot of money and they are not doing anything that isn't allowed by the site as it is set up, so they feel they are doing nothing wrong. In fact they are following the best protocol which allows for 10 full power votes each day without it depleting your voting power too much and are limiting their posts too ten a day and things are going well.
Being proud and honourable, they could very well take being flagged as an insult or challenge to themselves, especially when the reason given seems to only be jealousy that they are making too much money. So they flag in retaliation. They don't understand their flagger's motives and the flagger can't seem to understand theirs. So then it escalates with further insults from the flaggers along the lines of name calling. Then others seen to be joining in and this lion that has been poked starts lashing out with flags for people who didn't necessarily flag them to start with; they just resteemed some posts or made a comment in support maybe. Not surprisingly this is going too far for the flaggers with the destruction of peaceful accounts basically getting caught in the cross fire and, understandably, something had to be done.
However, I have to ask myself, would it have gotten this far had they been left alone? Yes, they are earning a large share of the reward pool, but there is still plenty of reward pool still left to go around. Are we taking a scarcity mentality when an abundancy one would serve us better? If you don't like any account taking over trending each day, wouldn't another solution be to upvote some other posts you do like in that category to reward them more, rather than flagging and no-one seeing rewards?
There are other cultures that end up clashing with some western ideals here. For people in third and second world countries the US dollar has a much higher value than for us. They can potentially earn enough here to provide for themselves without too much effort. They may not have the talents to make what we would consider quality posts. So they get a group of their own people together and upvote each other while posting what we would consider spam. The chances are that we might flag those posts as spam, taking away what few cents they earn, but then when we think about it, should we really begrudge them those few cents if it can provide a meal for them? After all, there's plenty to go around and how would we feel in that situation? We don't know their circumstances.
We have the ability on here to make communities of people who have similar ethics and can choose to stay within these groups and ignore those who we don't agree with. If the way of that group changes and we no longer agree with it, we can leave. It's seems a fair and peaceful enough way to do things, yet even some of these groups are being targeted by flaggers who don't believe in their ethics or honesty.
Do you think we will ever be able to transcend our differences?