's posts. I originally started flagging with only one of my two accounts, but the persistence of other collusive whales in up-voting this content has forced me to express myself more firmly. I don't like to flag accounts because I feel these kinds of "fights" are not good for the platform, but I also know that allowing what I consider to be abusive, collusive voting to continue is even worse.
This post represents my personal opinion and does not represent the opinion of Steemit, Inc. I feel that as a founder of the platform I should have equal rights to vote as everyone else who acquired a large stake by mining early on.
We recently ran some statistics and found that
What is more, I have reason to believe that
This is a very subjective issue when voting on an individual post. When in doubt I tend to let things slide because I recognize that other people may value things differently than me. Every unique post deserves some time in the sun.
The problem I have with
After a while I grew tired of scrolling past his posts multiple times per day every day. He was dominating the trending page. So I decided to dig deeper. What I discovered is that 95% of every post could be completely automated. The 5% that couldn't be automated involved one paragraph describing a chart and drawing a few unlabeled lines. As a programmer I also know that much the remaining 5% were text descriptions were formulaic, meaning that a computer could generate the text and simply substitute in different numbers on different days. Even the charts could be automatically annotated by software simply by looking at the data. All told, it would be a trivial computer science project to replace 99% of the content.
In my humble opinion, almost every single post and comment on the site represented more real value than
Some whales have frequently flagged high profile bloggers such as myself, 
My response to such criticism was to decline payout on the majority of my posts. I respectfully request that
Many people may not realize it, but one of the whales supporting
I have been tolerating his behavior because he is a whale. In my opinion he has proven himself to be a bad whale. A whale who profiting by promoting
I will no longer flag
The trolls and spammers are always the first to cry censorship. They will say outrageous things in order to defend their gravy train. I have no problem with his "content" and would never dream of flagging it if it declined rewards. What we have here is a legitimate difference of opinion between two whales.
When we both express our contrary opinions on a particular piece of content things are fair. What is not acceptable is to take this disagreement outside the voting booth and start throwing a tantrum by flagging my comments that weren't even getting any meaningful payout. Whether you believe
Steem is a platform where everyone gets to vote their stake. We know that there are people who will attempt to gain every advantage if it profits them, even at the expense of the whole. They will claim that I am the one attempting to game the rules to secure an even larger stake for me and my friends, but this is mere projection. I created Steem to give it away. I designed a system to intentionally include as many people as possible. I have no need for more stake and am actively giving away much of the STEEM I do have to fund development and free account signups.
Lets not make this about any individual post. Lets look at the past 6 months of unchallenged milking of the platform. Leaving these actions unchallenged will only make the abusers stronger.
Hopefully we can move on to more productive activity.
