<h4>Recently, there was an issue that arose from flagging of certain posts by @transisto.</h4>

@michelle.gent has been a prolific fiction author here on Steemit.  She's made it a point of serializing some of her content to release as individual posts.  As an author who's done the same with some of my own work, I understand how that goes; I've recently stopped serializing one of my novels because I plan to publish it through Steemhouse Publishing on the Writers' Block.

A few days ago, @transisto decided to flag several of Michelle's serialized posts.  They weren't full flags to reduce the value of her post to zero.  Near as I can tell, and by his own admission, they were posts to reduce the value of her post based on viewership, timeliness, and popularity.

<center>https://i.imgur.com/km1K0V1.jpg</center>
<center>https://i.imgur.com/9wAceON.jpg</center>

There's more than a couple of things wrong here, so I'll start with the first thing on my mind:
- **"Size of Viewership"** - I'm going to touch on this first because this is an absolute bullshit metric.  Flagging as a method for dealing with reward imbalance is something to consider, and there's plenty of cases where I would consider that to be true.  However, if one of your criteria for reducing a vote payout is because someone is *relatively unknown*, that disincents people from putting their best foot forward.  Better to stick to mainstream posting and go with the flow, lest one of their posts catch someone's eye and they get a big bonus, only to be denied it later.
- **Quality of Posting** - Quality has always been subjective, and I've been consistent in arguing that people can vote based on what they think is quality.  However, flagging posts based on that criteria opens up wide avenues for abuse.  Say you think cyberpunk fiction is just absolute garbage.  Say you're also privy to a sizeable flag.  Well, based on this criteria alone, why not nuke all cyberpunk fiction?  Quality does play a role, but we're talking the difference between a cat picture and *any reasonably produced original content.*
- **Popularity** - Given @transisto's actions, I'm assuming he meant whether or not the poster was popular, which ties back into viewership.  If not, why are you punishing people for catching more attention?

<h4>This has raised a bigger question about flagging in general.</h4>
I don't think flagging should disappear or that it should somehow change functionally.  I know those suggestions have been made elsewhere.  However, I do think that there should be some clear standards for what should result in flagging and what shouldn't.  The problem is that these decisions are, necessarily subjective.

That being said, I'm pretty sure we can all agree on some basis for flagging posts.  Spam is an obvious choice.  Something like child pornography would be another.  Posts that are poorly constructed, or are copypasta are also reasonable to consider for flagging.  However, when posts are flagged for "inadequate viewership" or not being supreme quality, users take notice.  Users see these things.

<h4> I don't care who you are; the thought of hitting an amazing payday because a whale catches your posts and gives you a bonus is a huge boost of confidence.  It's an incentive.  Declaring, essentially, that users who get a big boost on their work don't deserve it because they're not popular enough to deserve it is ludicrous.</h4>

As one of the moderators, supporters, and users of the Writers' Block, this episode has been especially relevant for me.  How are we supposed to encourage new authors to put their work out?  How are we supposed to convince authors to leave their established publishing arenas to come to Steemit?  This was damaging not just to @michelle.gent, but to the platform as a whole.  I appreciate that @transisto doesn't think that novel-writing is a good fit for the platform.  Thankfully, he's not the arbiter of what is or isn't good for Steemit.

<h4>Unless Steemit is supposed to just be about crypto, as @transisto indicated with his reward for a trending post in r/bitcoin or r/cryptocurrency, then we, as a community and as a platform, need to speak out loudly and vigorously to prevent this kind of flagging abuse.  That's exactly what this, and flagging like this, amounts to.
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