Totally agree that the bidbots are a cancer that shouldn't be allowed. But the rot started with the very design of the platform, see page 15 of the Steem Whitepaper: "Eliminating "abuse" is not possible and shouldn't be the goal."

This is the very moment when the rot started spreading.

Yes, totally eliminating abuse is not possible but it must always be the goal.

Abuse should be fought BY THE PLATFORM, through the way it's implemented. Not by "vigilante" action. The police of a state have a role, if you allow "vigilante" and "mob" actions you get ... the US and its rate of gun violence that is tens of times above any other civilized country.

I believe your proposal is even more misguided than that fateful phrase of the whitepaper. I believe you are fatally wrong when you write "If people start flagging more, everybody else wins."

If people start flagging there will be the equivalent of civil war on the platform. The flagged will start organizing and fighting back - you have the illustration with grumpycat and "the resistance".

The whole platform will be consumed by destructive flagging wars. Instead of building communities we'll just try to run for safety and take sides with either the vigilante mob that dictates what's "shitpost" and what's not OR "the resistance".

Unlike a physical country where people actually have to fight because fleeing is not always possible, this will lead to a MASSIVE bleeding of the platform and possibly its death.

https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmXSc589gfcEaa7frupwzfnbuRSZ8JBL4213AdqiutcJx3
(c) Hive account@lishu

Let's stay positive. Reward good posts, encourage those writing shitposts to improve, gently admonish them if they don't but reserve flagging only for the steemit equivalents of "criminals" - those who post phishing links, scams, really serious abuse.

In the medium-long term, I hope the platform will enforce a 1 : 1 relationship between your steemit account and the real you. Because if on Steemit you are the real you, there's a whole corpus of research showing that you'll behave more responsibly because your real self only has one reputation - hard to build, easy to tarnish.

People controlling several accounts are only one second away from doing something reprehensible because no one can trace the misbehaving account to them and they can always "dump" a compromised account.

I can see why someone prizing anonymity might be strongly against this idea but well, that's my opinion ...

(self-upvoted for visibility; I hate self-upvoting but since sorting is broken I see no other way)