Sometimes your given a choice in life...

Make powerful friends or make powerful enemies...

That choice isn't always easy...

As I write this there is a little voice inside me saying "stop... Don't do it... Your opinion isn't popular and your reputation is on the line..."

But I don't want to feel like I'm walking on egg shells because I'm too cowardly to stop the abuse.

According to the STEEM Whitepaper:

The challenge faced by Steem is deriving an algorithm for scoring individual contributions that most community members consider to be a fair assessment of the subjective value of each contribution. In a perfect world, community members would cooperate to rate each other's contribution and derive a fair compensation. In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.

Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: everyone’s meaningful contribution to the community should be recognized for the value it adds. When people are recognized for their meaningful contributions, they continue contributing and the community grows. Any imbalance in the give and take within a community is unsustainable. Eventually the givers grow tired of supporting the takers and disengage from the community.

A proven system for evaluating and rewarding contributions is the free market. The free market can be viewed as a single community where everyone trades with one another and rewards are allocated by profit and loss. The market system rewards those who provide value to others and punishes those who consume more value than they produce. The free market supports many different currencies and money is simply a commodity that everyone finds easy to exchange.

There was a time when there was a sense of nobility and respect for the system across the community. There was a community effort to downvote abuse and discourage it. I watched and was thrilled by the efforts of the stakeholders to keep the system clean from abuse by downvoting those who were consuming value from the rest of the community. Somewhere along the line we lost something and our souls were bought. Something shiny distracted us maybe...

Here's how the community used to react when somebody attemped to BUY votes on steemit.com

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steve-walschot/bloggery-1-get-all-sbd-rewards-for-this-post-fair-and-equal-for-everyone
https://img1.steemit.com/0x0/https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmcZiXooFTxU6Dmsjnvvv4T7ob8agBbuC6mXjPkT8cXy9Y
https://steemit.com/steemit/@claudiop63/steembets-bet-for-free-by-upvoting-and-win-steem-dollars-inauguration-bet-clinton-vs-trump


https://steemit.com/steemit/@august-newbie/flag-abuse-or-how-to-kill-the-steemit-community

https://steemit.com/market/@steemitmarket/upvote-follow-market

https://steemd.com/market/@steemitmarket/upvote-follow-steem-market

https://steemit.com/steemit/@frosty/escrow-backed-newbies-welcome-everyone-who-upvotes-this-post-will-get-an-equal-amount-of-bitcoin-just-provide-your-bitcoin
https://steemit.com/steemit/@etherguy/steemitlotto-just-comment-with-a-number-0-99-and-an-upvote-to-play-for-a-chance-to-win-the-daily-jackpot
https://steemit.com/steemit/@mark-waser/power-up-your-steem-account-with-120-sbd-for-usd100

Now, one could argue that vote buying is inevitable. For instance, when advertisers come to the platform, they may well just slip something in a whales pocket behind closed doors. There is nothing to stop them from doing that other than the risk of being suspected - which might not matter to them. But how much do you think a whale would be willing to charge for their attention (vote)? Do you think "a portion of the rewards from the post" would do it?

I highly doubt it

Here we are on a revolutionary platform that is teaching us for the first time ever to value our attention and we are valuing it at what? .... 0.25 STEEM?

YOU ARE DEVALUING YOUR VOTE

Some of those who support @steemsports argue that it is a game that keeps users active. Apparently people get a little kick out of winning less that one STEEM. When I joined steemit, you know what got me hooked? When I got significantly more steem than that! And I find it hard to believe that anybody here really beleives the fun part is winning less than one steem, when steemsports reaps the rewards 4 times a day on a daily basis.

Look! I have nothing against sports or betting. In fact, I enjoy them. But if you want STEEM to become the cryptocurrency of the masses then that is what we need to learn to use as money. Steemsports has been building their own platform for accepting bets and I look forward to using it to actually gamble with STEEM. On top of that, they have accumulating enough SP and popularity from the community to continue without redistributing STEEM back to those who vote for them (buying your votes). Further, I do not wish to discourage people from voting for them AFTER they refrain from vote buying. Their content and writers are good and I would hope that they would respect the communities wishes and stay with us if the community were to turn against their vote buying efforts - which is what I am about to ask you to do!

I'm sure that this will stir a lot of controversy and some might even call me a hypocrit for this but here goes....

Flagging is for Abuse and Vote Buying is Abuse

I am pledging to reward everybody who stands with me by flagging one of the following @steemsports posts (before their payout).

https://steemit.com/nfl/@steemsports/minnesota-vikings-vs-green-bay-packers
https://steemit.com/soccer/@steemsports/juventus-f-c-vs-a-c-milan
https://steemit.com/nba/@steemsports/toronto-raptors-vs-utah-jazz
In fact I will distribute more STEEM because I will value your attention much higher than they have by distributing all of the liquid rewards in my wallet at the time of the payout from this post. Here is a screenshot of what is currently in my wallet but I would also include any STEEM or SBD that anybody wishes to donate towards this effort.

These flags should serve as a message - not to ask @steemsports to leave - but to ask them to respect the votes of the community and their value. We want this to be a place where the whole community can feel like they have an opportunity to grow here. We also want our STEEM and our votes to be valuable. Please do not see the flags as an attack, but a message to show just how many steemians would prefer if @steemsports was not pulling so much of the STEEM rewards from the daily payouts by buying their votes. We would much appreciate if you would just accept the votes you get without purchasing them with the promise of redistribution.

---

Edit: Because this post has been censored by a whale and there has not been any entries for the flag rewards yet, the SBD from my wallet have been spent on buying the attention of anybody who has used their flag on a steemsports post before. The steem in my wallet by the time of payout of this post will still be rewarded to anybody who flags the steemsports posts linked above before payout. There is no need to upvote this post unless you want to increase visibility.