It was brought to my attention lately from a Steem user that there's a big account farming rewards and voting up spam, now while I realize there are many doing the same, accounts such as Haejin, this one seemed somewhat new and was under the impression that just because he had purchased stake it meant that he could use it however he wanted to allocate rewards from the reward pool.
Now don't get me wrong, I know about most of the "bad activity" that goes on on the platform due to the broken economics and lack of "proof of brain" and I may be a bit hypocritical when it comes to reacting to this account but ignoring others but I figured it would be a good warm up for HF21 and what's to come to act in this scenario. Basically the Steemian that alerted me about this case was being flagged for calling out his actions, his actions being such that he only voted on his own accounts on content that were a mix of a title with a sentence, a screenshot or just a short comment.
One of his posts was something along the lines of "I vote however I want", so I downvoted it and replied with "I am also voting how I want" and then some lovely comments explaining my action and then retaliation started. Now I normally don't care for votes, you could even say my content may not even deserve the rewards it is receiving but it's not always about just the content. Especially in a time like this when most stake is either being used on bid bots, vote-trading where the content usually has less and less effort due to the guaranteed votes in a similar fashion as autovotes, or blatant self-voting of short content like in this case.
Something I don't tolerate though and which kind of triggers me is when they retaliate on actual decent and worthwhile content just because those users dared to flag his shit content in the first place. This reminds me of the retaliation that went on in the early days with Haejin and over time made it so that not many dared to use the downvotes even if they wanted to and even if it cost them because they feared that their "Steem career" or earnings would be done for for good. Even with the change from flags onto downvoting it did not increase the volume of them, so here we are now with HF21 coming up and free downvotes and the hopes of normalizing them. If there is anything we should embrace the downvotes and not let people be punished for using them, especially not if it's blatant retaliation as in this case.
I was going to leave it be after a couple downvotes but noticed that he started it up today and even decided to include a post I had resteemed. Well, that's where I kind of draw the line and will halt my curation to make sure his damage is as little as possible and see if anyone else is up for helping me with countering his retaliations.
This is what it's gonna be about though, accounts like these that don't care about the rewards and just want to bully smaller accounts around even though their downvotes are not justified due to the content they land on is what will probably happen a lot more with the free downvotes. I know many have had these concerns but with every new opportunity and addition there will always be ways to abuse it but it's on us to work together and make sure that the positives from it will outweigh the negatives, such as decentralization in general.
So this will be sort of like a warm up for me for HF21. Am I losing rewards by doing this? Sure, but just sitting idly by and letting him retaliation on smaller accounts while he farms rewards from the pool by providing no content is probably worse in the long haul. At least I know that he'll be wasting downvotes on my posts instead of continuously leeching from the pool and bringing the price down further. We have a lot of these leaks going on nowadays and I really hope the next HF we will be able to tap these up and make sure that only deserving authors and content are getting rewards, no matter if they are big or small or have earned or purchased Steem. This is not a fucking proof of stake blockchain, it sure kinda looks like it now with all the ROI from bots and other services we have but that will hopefully change soon and bring back some kind of content discovery and distribution to effort. It's time people realize that it doesn't matter how much more ROI we can earn than our neighbors, what matters is how good we can govern our reward pool and increase the price of the currency, once we get that to go up there will be a lot more doors and opportunities waiting for us and a blockchain that's ready to take them all on.
I am still hopeful but we have to band together to make sure this becomes a reality.
Peace
