What became of @heymattsokol?

I had a lot of interaction with musician Hive account@heymattsokol via Steemit. He was posting cool music and I even bought one of his EPs. I know he was living off what he made here, but it seems a combination of circumstances drove him away. You can read his thoughts on Medium. Consider leaving him a comment there, but I'm not going to beg him to come back. It's his choice.

I won't deny that Steemit has issues. There's vote selling, voting circles (by various names) and rampant abuse. I've seen accounts that just put up junk posts or comments all day and self-vote them to a few dollars. That adds no value at all to this platform, but I can't do much about it.

My vote is about 42c at the moment depending on how much VP I have left. I have delegated most of my SP to people I think will use it well. If I try to flag some of the big abusers they may decide to retaliate and trash my posts. I can't really afford that. However I will delegate to some groups who do deal with the trash. If enough of us do this then they can have real effect.

I've also had someone contact me about the flagging actions of one of these accounts that I supported. They haven't shown me the specific incident, but it's possible the flag was not justified. A flag is not the violent act some take it as. It's just as valid as a vote and I don't think many people question that too much. The first reason given on the flag popup is 'disagreement on rewards' and that's my main reason to flag. If I see a crappy photo with $500 on it I may flag and that's valid. That person took the choice to buy votes and make their post stand out. They may lose money on the deal, but generally there's not enough flagging to take it all. Instead they may gain some junk followers and small votes from people scrabbling for curation rewards.

There is a risk Steemit could go down the toilet, but some of us are fighting to prevent that. We just have to fight the winnable wars and that's why we may go after smaller accounts rather than the big ones. It's not about attacking minnows, it's about cleaning up Steemit and making a little more of the rewards available for good people. We need the whales to deal with the big cases. Steem Inc do delegate to some spam and abuse fighters, but some abusers just seem to get away with it.

If you have a few thousand SP then please consider delegating it where it will do some good. I'll let you make your own choice on where that will be, but I'll suggest using tools like Steemd and SteemReports to check on how those accounts behave.

Let's make Steemit great again, to paraphrase someone I'm not keen on.

Steem on!

• I'll buy guitar picks for Steem Dollars
• Get a Wirex Debit Card to spend your crypto.
• Steemians can get Byteball airdrop
• Get some passive income with Mannabase
• If this post is over seven days old you can vote up one of my newer posts to reward me.

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