A few months ago a few whales engaged in a so-called "flag war" in which they ended up flagging (most of the time abusively) other people caught in the middle. By "flag" I understand a downvote. If you downvote a post, and your voting power is bigger than the current reward of the post, it will be added back to the reward pool ("taken away" from the post). I used quotation marks because no reward is sure to be distributed until the moment of distribution, until then everybody can upvote & downvote as he / she sees fit. During that flag war many people saw their rewards vanishing, there was a lot of frustration.
Don't you feel there's a little bit of a problem with people not wanting to upvote comments and posts out of some kind of selfishness or fear of 'using up' their voting power too much? I still have to wrap my head around it all, but I thought there'd be in general just a lot more voting happening in comments sections. People are thus hesitant to upvote comments and overall discussions suffer as a result. On Reddit for example there's no cost to simply upvote to say "this is a good comment", but here people don't seem to want to do so - I'm not entirely sure why.
Maybe people incorrectly think there's actually a direct cost to them whenever they upvote on Steemit - what do you think? Because, from what I understand, people should be upvoting whatever they think is worth getting more attention/getting their virtual thumbs up, but people don't because there is a strange sense of scarcity attached to something as simple as an upvote.
See, there's two elements to the upvote: the number of votes, and the earnings of votes, and we're getting a little hung up on the latter for some reason.
For someone such as myself who has been using the platform for less than a month, what are you referring to here with regards to "toxicity"?
A few months ago a few whales engaged in a so-called "flag war" in which they ended up flagging (most of the time abusively) other people caught in the middle. By "flag" I understand a downvote. If you downvote a post, and your voting power is bigger than the current reward of the post, it will be added back to the reward pool ("taken away" from the post). I used quotation marks because no reward is sure to be distributed until the moment of distribution, until then everybody can upvote & downvote as he / she sees fit. During that flag war many people saw their rewards vanishing, there was a lot of frustration.
Cool, thanks for the explanation.
Don't you feel there's a little bit of a problem with people not wanting to upvote comments and posts out of some kind of selfishness or fear of 'using up' their voting power too much? I still have to wrap my head around it all, but I thought there'd be in general just a lot more voting happening in comments sections. People are thus hesitant to upvote comments and overall discussions suffer as a result. On Reddit for example there's no cost to simply upvote to say "this is a good comment", but here people don't seem to want to do so - I'm not entirely sure why.
Maybe people incorrectly think there's actually a direct cost to them whenever they upvote on Steemit - what do you think? Because, from what I understand, people should be upvoting whatever they think is worth getting more attention/getting their virtual thumbs up, but people don't because there is a strange sense of scarcity attached to something as simple as an upvote.
See, there's two elements to the upvote: the number of votes, and the earnings of votes, and we're getting a little hung up on the latter for some reason.
I think this will even out in the end. It's a process.
Hope so. I'm really impressed by Steemit for the most part, and hope to be in it for the long haul. Keep up the good work, sir.