Responsibility of your votes

When we started out with Hive account@ocdb it was meant to fill up the whitelist with quality content creators and since Hive account@ocd was already curating those and focusing on newcomers it made sense that they'd be able to use the bot to grow their accounts as they were still small. At the same time since they started out by being curated we hoped that they'd use their newfound growth of their accounts through ocdb to use their stake for curation as well, remembering how they started their Steem Journey.

In the meantime we did make whitelist application posts (the current active one is the 4th of its kind and before you ask, yes we will add and respond to everyone very soon) and added some other authors that were not curated by us but provided general quality content and were looked at as "good" Steem users. Meaning they curated with their stake and saw the potential in the long run, not just figuring out ways to extract as much value from the chain without giving anything back in return.

Of course with the size of the whitelist, currently over 3500 authors (many of course inactive after 2 long years) not everyone was going to behave as a "good" steemian or try to curate manually which many of us prefer. Not that there's anything wrong with auto now since downvotes are in, but we can all agree that autovotes had a lot of side-effects in the past that brought down quality and engagement as authors just came to Steem to write their 1-2 daily posts for their guaranteed upvote and left without giving two shits about anything else. Everything has changed though since the EIP and I think even autovotes will start receiving some flak from the free downvotes if the side-effects mentioned above keep being put into light.

The biggest reason to autovote though is the ROI of curation, as you may have guessed. People may say they don't like manual curation and that they want to support certain authors patreon style and that's all okay, but let's be real, especially nowadays autovotes are the best way to increase your ROI. You either follow certain accounts that attempt to maximize it or autovote yourself through steemauto on certain authors while front-running others. Without getting too much into the philosophy of autovoting and the front-running race to the edge of the penalty timer, let's get back to what I wanted to address in this post.

We have noticed many whitelisted authors that have used Hive account@ocdb for a long time, some max bidding on their content, growing their account over time and while their content was of quality most of it - it does not justify them now taking the easy route to autovote or trail accounts that attempt to maximize the rewards. Especially not when these votes are being cast on abusive content.

By abusing I mean voting rings, only bid botted content, etc. Ever since Hive account@ocdb has started using its downvotes to fight abuse, it feels very wrong to see whitelisted authors front-run said abuse. Thus we have decided to take action against this in the spirit of #newsteem and the general change in psychology and action being taken on our platform since the hardfork, and will be giving out warnings to accounts spotted doing this. If they then continue for some time to curate non-content/voting rings/abusive bid botted content, etc, we will have to take action by removing them from the whitelist.

I know many will feel that this is unfair cause it has nothing to do with their authoring but Hive account@ocdb has been nonprofit and we have always wanted the authors that grew with it to do good for the platform. There is always a cost to something and in this case this will be one of them to having used or currently using Hive account@ocdb.

If there are any more questions or thoughts about this, let me know in the comments and we can discuss it.

Thanks for reading.