Today's Edition: Flag War, Steemitzens of Steem, Keeping Steem/Steemit Clean, Holiday Wreath

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Flagging War: What The Hell Do You Have In Your Mind? A Short Term Solution To Fix a Long Term Problem?

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I think @elear is addressing the problem of downvoting in the context of the recent dust ups between @blocktrades & @nextgencrypto as well as @transisto and others downvoting what they see as overvalued content.

Any solution also needs to take into consideration spam & abuse prevention. It seems for every problem that we attempt to solve we create more by not considering all the aspects.

Stop the voting/downvoting bots completely and force manual curation in this platform OR only allow specific ones based on a consesus of the community. There are many technical ways this can be achieved.

As long as bots are allowed to post this isn't a realistic solution.

I spend hours a day running data queries & using that data to manually curate accounts I feed to @mack-bot & @spaminator.

@mack-bot 'marks' 1000 to 1500 posts/day a day with downvotes. @spaminator downvotes between 50-700 posts/comments 6.5 days later calculated by a vote bot to use just enough VP to remove payout. Doing that by hand used to take hours.

I don't have time to manually curate (upvote). @patrice follows a trail that is manually curated. I like to know that in a small way I am contributing in a more positive way than just downvoting abuse. The only account I bot upvote a 100% is @zoee to help increase her SP & VP to support the community by upvoting.

YOU WON'T NEED TO FLAG ANYONE SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY WILL STAY IN THE DARK.

From my perspective that is actually more of a problem. If it is out in the open then the community can see it and flag it. @dart operated behind the scenes for more than a month. Check their withdrawals. They withdrew 81,851.07 STEEM & 6989.747 SBD since about mid April I believe. And that is just what we can see directly withdrawn fromt the account. They also tried to hide their minnowbooster abuse with transfers directly from exchanges.

Note: I've refrained from posting the amounts withdrawn from the @dart account since it highlights a very negative view of STEEM & steemit.com and isn't something that will attract investors.

I think it is more important the that the community realise the scale of abuse @steemcleaners, @spaminator and other groups are trying to prevent.

Fintal Though I actually had a lot more to say on the topic but on further thought, I think the soluiton will have to come from communities & SMT's.

As I understand it communities using SMT's exclusively will have the ability to build their websites (and community) with total control over all aspects from membership, upvotes/downvotes & reward distribution. This will alleviate what some see as a drain on the reward pool by certain types of content & perceived value of content if they do not use the STEEM token.

Steemitzens of Steemit

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I dropped by the Virtual Weekly "SteemFest" after a personal invite from @sircork yesterday for the debut of his new SteemStar Network. The show will air every Sunday and operates on an informal drop-in basis. I think that a lot of interesting viewpoints were aired by witnesses & steemians. I look forward to participating in the future.

Keeping Steem/Steemit Clean

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If you missed it, I'm still doing a little bit of a happy dance over the fact that monitorcap, appbliz, & trafficmonitor have stopped their 200+ posts a day. A curation project is a lot more than automated bot posting X number of posts every 5-6 minutes.

After reading my previous Steemit Dredge Report, @themarkymark told me he was going to make a post of his own to gain additional visibility of the problem.

@themarkymark generously donated 200STEEM to help fight spam and @sostrin donated an additional 100STEEM! Virtual Hugs to you!

Thank you to everyone who used their valuable VP to help stop this spam!

@spaminator

Looks like @dart is back at it. I'll have to do some data analysis to see if they have added more accounts.

I've add around 100 new accounts yesterday fitting a known Russian Spammer. Looks like I missed a few in my last data sweep when they changed things up a bit on me.

After further thought and review, and input from the community I have added cryptomonitor to my list.

@mack-bot

@mack-bot is now posting daily logs to help support the bot. It is struggling right now to keep up so I temporarily removed a few accounts that are -1 and automatically hidden. Since this is temporary and does not affect anything I'm not asking for donations, delegations or upvotes.

Holiday Wreath

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Martin's cousin Joe makes these wreaths by hand. He placed one on Martin's grave the day he was buried and graciously sent me one. For the last 4 years Martin & I have received wreaths that we hang on the front porch and leave there year round for the birds to build their nest. It's sad to know this will be the last. I hope that I am still here in the summer to find birds nesting in it.

Black Friday #3 update

The computer still hasn't made it into the case yet. I've been too busy dealing with different issues.

Witness Voting

You can vote for my witness here.

Wittnesses I vote for and support:

@abit	@guiltyparties	@someguy123
@aggroed	@jesta	@steemgigs
@anyx	@lukestokes.mhth	@swelker101
@arcange	@neoxian	@teamsteem
@ausbitbank	@netuoso	@themarkymark
@chitty	@nnnarvaez	@timcliff
@drakos	@pfunk	@wackou
@fubar-bdhr	@reggaemuffin	@good-karma
@ats-witness	@riverhead	@yehey
@gtg	@sircork	@followbtcnews

Image by @atopy

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Current Projects:

@steemcleaners 🙣 @spaminator 🙣 @steemsugars

My Delegations:

Account	MVests
@msp-creativebot	0.206
@reveur	0.211

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