If you're a whale, you have a couple options for using your SP:
- delegate to a bot or the lease market for passive ROI
- circle jerk your/your friends' posts
- curate and get a 25% credit on your vote
- delegate to a charity
- sit on it and pretend to be Scrooge McDuck
Of these, delegating/leasing to the bot and lease market are by far the most passive and highest reward/work.
There is very little incentive to then turn around and use your SP to flag a post where you get nothing in return. There would be some incentive if you still got a curation reward for flagging, but I don't think that's the case. (I'd have to check to be sure though).
So I don't think we will see a lot of flagging coming back to the chain.
What might be more effective is pointing out to bot bidders that the profits have pretty well been arbitraged away. The bid bots function as a wealth transfer from minnows to whales, with not much in return for the minnows except visibility. But visibility for what? It's pretty rare that the vote buyers get any organic votes that are worth much.
I just checked the faq and curation rewards are not earned for flagging.
On a side note here: there's @steemflagrewards, rewarding flags with an upvote with slightly more value. The project is comparably young, still rather limited in terms of SP and by far no compensation for whale flags, but it's a great incentive for "small players" to use some of the stake also for flags.
I hadn't heard of that one. Thanks.
The incentive to flag is respect and appreciation :)
I would do point 3 in your list, and if the majority did the same, there would be no stopping this platform.
Sure you might, but most people will go with the highest reward/work ratio. It's just not realistic to expect human nature to change. Why do work and make 25% when you can do nothing and make 35%?
The real trick will be figuring out how to turn a bid bot into a positive activity for the rest of the chain gang.
There was a time where Whales would flag each other for excessive self-voting. Much easier to hide behind a BB which does similar, expect you don't even need to create the content - genius.
Get your thinking cap on - a major prize awaits the winner :)
I think it goes back to the quality scores we were discussing a few weeks ago combined with a 100% payout to investors.
Basically, create a status symbol on top of the actual vote value that would make users proud to qualify for an exclusive bid bot.
SMTs might be able to accomplish a similar function if they ever happen.
Creating brand value is always challenging though.