You're right. A lot of people a expecting to be paid for post they made without any effort. They just take a random picture on google, and then they use randowhale or other voting bots. And then there are people who put a lot of work into their post, and never get noticed. That's one of the sad part of Steemit. That's why everybody that has enough SP should use it wisely, and find great and original content creators.
I still never used the flag system, but do you think I should? There is so many spam posts that I would get my voting power drained. I prefer to use it to upvote good content... Hard choice. What's your tactic? Do you use 50/50 upvote/flag?
I mainly upvote. I don't have a specific ratio. I just flag when I get annoyed. lol