In my time on Steem I have seen all sorts of ways people try to abuse it. Some of the abusers are so big that it is difficult to do much about them without serious retaliation, but as part of the @SteemFlagRewards team I was able to help deal with some smaller cases before they got too bad.
Of course we have freedom on Steem, but the community may decide that some actions are counterproductive. This is why we were given flags, that were recently renamed to downvotes on the Steemit site. They are a way to adjust post rewards before the payout and they can also affect the account reputation. If that gets too low then your posts become invisible.
An example of abuse is the user Crystallui who has been on Steem long enough to know better, but has persisted in just taking whilst giving no value to the platform.
I have the Steem Blacklist extension by @TheMarkyMark which shows he (I am assuming male) has already been called out by various vote sellers. Unfortunately others do not seem to blacklist. I know they are operating as businesses, but not doing so is detrimental to Steem. We do not want new users to see these bad examples when they first visit.
He has persistently posted stock images and videos to buy votes on with little or no community support. I think he has given up any pretense of being genuine with posts like this that Google translates from Chinese for me.
This is one of several accounts he controls that all do much the same. Most have negative reputation now. It is covered up, but that post is currently valued at $11.77 with votes from a couple of bots. I can see that mack-bot has already given it a small downvote, so it is likely to be wiped out before it pays.
I have been less active with @SteemFlagRewards recently, but I keep an eye on their Discord for reports of bad cases. When his came up I dropped a few downvotes. Mine will only be a few cents, but others will join in. It may be because I added some comments on what I thought of his behaviour that caused him to flag me back. That had little effect as he does not have much SP and he runs down his voting power with self-votes and downvotes to others. On top of that he seems to accidentally up-vote me sometimes and has to cancel that. That still uses up voting power.
He can get quite abusive when you criticise him. He bought votes on this comment that got cancelled out.
Today I saw this on Steem Now. For about half a second I though I had been caught doing something bad, but the account name lacks a letter and only has a tiny influence. Since that account is sharing our subject's posts we can be sure it is him.
From his wallet we can see he is powering down, presumably to free up Steem to buy more votes, but that will be wasted if they all get cancelled out. Also in his wallet we can see some discussions he has had with our old 'friend' attempt who was caught out ages ago. I guess they are using that instead of comments so it cannot be flagged, but it lets us follow the chat. It is quite entertaining.
atempt has been flagging me on and off since I flagged him a few times, but it is really nothing to worry about as his several accounts cannot even remove 1c. What is funny is that he upvotes some of my comments to try and earn from curation, but that has a very poor return. It is actually sad as both of these people couple earn something from honest content if they wanted to. I am just grateful to those determined people behind Steem Flag Rewards who are prepared to take the flack for dealing with such abuse. They have prevented thousands of dollars in rewards going to posts and comments that added to value to the Steem platform, so everyone else can earn a little more.
I am not flagging as much as I used to as I have been concentrating on helping small accounts through @TenKMinnows. I regard that as equally important. I am all in favour of new users doing well, but not by abusing their freedom.
I will say that I have seen some people falling foul of Steem Flag Rewards who may not deserve it. There are differences of opinion in the group over these and it is a personal choice what you curate. A lot of abuse is obvious, but there are edge cases where it may not be clear if content is original and what value it may have. It can take a lot of time and effort to gather evidence, but opinions can still differ in the end. There are people behind this process and it is a great responsibility to use their power well (to mis-quote Spiderman).
I will be monitoring this situation, but this user does not really require my attention as he has already trashed his account and his posts are being dealt with more efficiently than I could manage.
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The geeky guitarist and facilitator of the 10K Minnows Project.
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