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First things first.

I am not here to TELL you what to think.

I am not here to answer the question posed in the title of this post.

I am here to simply present some of the facts that I have found and events that I have witnessed. As the author of this post, I am sure that it will be laced with my opinion (one of the harder things to get away from in writing) but I will try to make it abundantly clear what are facts of things happening, and what is just my thoughts. This post is intended as EDUCATIONAL, simply to inform as many people as possible of the events taking place so that they can make their own informed decisions, and generate their opinions based on facts. Every Steemian, from Plankton to Whale deserves to have their voice heard and their feelings taken into account. Not everyone on Steemit is a bot. A lot of us are actually real people, with real feelings. Unfortunately, at the moment, only those with extraordinarily large amounts of STEEMPOWER are heard. And regardless of if those users with large stake are correct, people will support what that user has to say in the hopes of getting a large Upvote from them (this is one of my opinions). This is not what Steemit was intended for! This is supposed to be uncensored, and unregulated, and not INFLUENCED BY THE ONE PERSON WITH THE MOST MONEY AND AN AGENDA!! While this platform offers a great deal of freedom to many, it offers opportunity to take advantage, as well. Money changes people, and greed has a way of showing itself. "The Truth" shouldn't be decided by the guy with the most money.

The Bidbot War

Hot topic across the platform. A lot of people are involved. MY OPINION? Not the right people, at least not in the right places or in the right ways.

There are quite a few problems with the bidbots. Are there solutions to the problem? Yes. Are the people trying to make these changes happen going about it the right way? In my opinion, NOT AT ALL!

Love them or hate them, the bots are probably not going anywhere. In my opinion, the bots and the shitposts are the trade off that we make for Steemit allowing us the freedoms that we have on this part of the internet. No censorship, no banners, no ads (though there is some argument that some posts are little more than advertisements. again, that is the trade off). A degree of freedom not offered anywhere else on the internet. As many of us are aware, with such freedom comes the opportunity to take advantage. I am not going to go into all of the details of all the ways people abuse the Freedom offered by Steemit. That would take too long, and that isn't the point of this post. At least, not this section of the post. The topic at hand is the bidbots. Specifically? Certain behaviors of these bidbots. Allowing posts to receive Upvotes after the post has reached a specific age. This is a problem. This allows shitposters to wait until the last possible second before buying an Upvote, in hopes that the large value of a really terrible post (terrible post is a vague term, but the consensus seems to be plagiarized work, spam, stolen memes etc, etc. On Steemit, we are supposed to be allowed to decide that for ourselves) will go unnoticed because of its age and receive it's large payout. The solution? Well, there could be several. Honestly, I believe that what has been implemented is PART OF a good solution to the problem. The majority of the bidbots have reduced the age limit of a post to 3.5 days. This gives people a chance to see the large valued, shitty posts and downvote them to a more appropriate value. I think that is only half of the solution, though. I think that there should be some kind of regulation on the part of the bot accounts. If the bidbots implemented a "blacklist" of sorts for people who have purchased votes on shit posts, that would also help to eliminate the problem here. This requires work on the part of the bidbots. But how do you get these accounts to fall in line? How do you get them to do something for the benefit of others...

Enter @grumpycat

Hero or Villain? Leader or Tyrant? Paragon or Fraud?

@grumpycat set out to make the bidbots follow some guidelines. HIS GUIDLINES! The specific rules imposed by @grumpycat and only @grumpycat.

In History, they have a word for that. It's dictator. Does this work? I don't think so, not according to the History Books, anyway. Eventually, no matter how good the intentions, people will resent you simply because you impose your rules with brutal force. ESPECIALLY when you impose rules on people, only to disregard and break that rule yourself. While the idea behind it was noble (reduce abuse to the reward pool by discouraging spammers from buying upvotes after the post reaches a certain age), the execution was terrible. Isn't this the kind of decision that should be made by more than one person?? Isn't this what we have witnesses and large stakeholders for? I know that these people communicate, whether here, on chat, or on discord, these people talk to each other. The people running the bidbots have chats and/or a discord as well. People should be communicating more. This is the kind of thing that should involve more than one person. Grumpy took it upon himself to make this happen, by himself. While this is seen by many as a Valiant act, I think that the methods used by grumpycat could have been much better. For starters, there are a lot of people on Steemit and in the various chat platforms dedicated to making the platform better for everyone. A lot more of these other people should have been involved. But in my opinion, that isn't the problem here, either. The method with which grumpycat forced these changes (and some of the voting bots were making these changes BEFORE grumpycat set out on this "mission") is just as harmful to the platform as the behaviors that he is "trying to change" (I say that in quotes here because while some changes have come about because of grumpycat's actions, nothing is really changing if grumpycat is ignoring his own rules and allowing himself to buy these late "6th day votes" while punishing others for doing the same thing. more on that coming). Sorry, I have a lot of things to say in this post, and I am getting a little jumbled. I am trying to keep things organized.

Flagging innocent accounts, hypocritical behavior, and general douchebaggery.

This is the part where I am going to have the most difficulty separating my opinion from the topic at hand.

There are a lot of other things going on that a lot of people have really strong opinions about. A lot of problems that also need solutions. Though I will be referencing some of these issues, I am not here to debate those issues. Some of them tie in here, some of them don't. Some of them, I honestly can't find my own proof of (not saying that they aren't real, nor am I saying that they are anything more than conspiracy theories), and some of them there is proof all across the platform of.

We all know Steemit is not perfect. I love Steemit, and I dedicate my efforts to welcoming new Steemians to the platform and spreading rewards to more users with my contests. I have a lot of fun, and I get to reward others while doing so! It's a win/win for everyone!! Yes, I have used bidbots. I do not believe that my content is spammy or scammy, I encourage engagement in the comments section, and suggest to new users posts that will help them get started and become more successful on the platform. I have used bidbots on my posts as late as 5 days. I have multiple reasons for doing so, not the least of which is that when I get the larger bot votes on my posts later, my followers and curators (other fantastic Steemians dedicated to spreading rewards to more users and helping ALL STEEMIANS, new and old, become more successful on the platform) receive larger rewards for curation. We all know the bots don't need the curation rewards. They already make money hand over fist selling the votes in the first place. And while I continue to produce what I think is quality content (and so do many others, otherwise I wouldn't get any votes at all on my contests) and put a conscious effort into how I use the bots, I do not see a problem with me using the bots. In the long run, I am spending my SBD for STEEMPOWER one way or another, and the rewards that I get are used to support the new users entering my next contest, and so forth. As long as other people believe that my content IS VALUABLE to the platform, then every vote that I buy from a bot is a vote that a scammer or spammer wasn't able to buy *(sound familiar? I think grumpy has stated something similar somewhere). As I have said, I understand the reason for reducing the age of posts you can buy upvotes for. I could still accomplish the same thing of rewarding my curators by buying the same votes before 3.5 days. That is no problem. The problem is that grumpycat is blindly flagging ALL ACCOUNTS using specific bots, while using those same bots himself. He has stated that he is flagging for specific reasons, like buying a vote on the sixth day of a post, while he uses the very same bots and buys votes on posts at day six himself. Is this not the definition of hypocrisy? The execution of grumpycat's plan was flawed. grumpy has made all of these claims that what he is doing is for the sake of helping the platform. Well, blindly flagging people for doing something that he himself does is not being a help to the platform. He isn't trying to help anyone. He is being a bully. Yes, it would take him a bit more time to check out posts to determine if they were spam or garbage, but again, that is where a blacklist for the votebots would come in. That is where the teamwork and actual "trying to help the platform" would come in. It isn't JUST grumpys responsibility to affect these changes. It would take some effort from grumpy AND the people running the bots. But grumpy has already stated himself that he is lazy. So instead of taking the time to see if he is flagging quality content or innocent users, he decided to just downvote every account and post of users who used a specific bot. While I am not happy that my post was downvoted by grumpycat, that is not what this post is about. I was downvoted for roughly ten dollars in potential rewards, which is not really that big of a deal, (especially considering grumpycat's massive voting strength, and he could have reduced my post to zero, instead he reduced a post worth about $52 in potential rewards to about $42). My problem is not being downvoted, my problem is the reason I was given for being downvoted, and the response that I received when I asked grumpy about it. When confronted with the question of flagging an innocent account (he gave the reason for flagging me as having purchased an upvote on day 6. That never happened) his response was that I was "collateral damage". That does not show me a person who cares about the platform.

grumpycat left three separate comments on my post to tell me not use sneaky-ninja, BEFORE the first time I responded to him. I asked him why he had to leave 3 separate comments on one post and upvote all of them for over a dollar in rewards. If he was trying to help the platform, he wouldn't need 3 different rewards for one action, let alone the fact that he didn't even try to reach out. Steemit is a very large place, and it is entirely possible for people to miss things in the big big Steemit Ocean. I actually had no idea about this "bidbot reform" until I was downvoted by grumpycat. No warning, no attempt to contact me. I would have had no problem changing from 5 day votes to 3 day votes, I understand the reasoning for that. But to punish me for not knowing about it? And to say it was for buying a vote on the 6th day when I bought the vote on the 5th day? There is a serious problem with that. But aside from all of that, the very worst behavior displayed by grumpycat, the thing that takes all of the good he is trying to accomplish for the platform and slaps it in the face before tossing it casually out of a high rise window, the thing that proves to me (this is where it becomes my opinion) is this:

When I asked him why he needed to reward himself 3 times for bullying one post, and I told him that I was flagging his comments because his actions against me didn't deserve that kind of rewards, he responded by saying "Rubbing it in" and upvoting his own comment to 163 dollars in potential rewards. Thankfully

@blocktrades has downvoted that comment, because nothing about it deserved 163 dollars...
Now, like I said, yes, I am unhappy that my post was downvoted, but that was not the purpose of this post. I want people to see the bigger picture. There is a lot more going on than just my post being flagged. If grumpycat "cares about the platform" and "wants to make steemit a better place", why wouldn't he put in that little bit of extra effort to gauge a post and decide if it was quality content or spam, instead of just blindly downvoting people for doing the same things that he does? If he "cared about the reward pool and how it was distributed", why would he abuse it in such a way as to reward himself so much for being a bully? And if he "cared about" any Steemians other than himself, why wouldn't he try to contact some of the quality content creators and let them know what is going on, instead of downvoting them? I don't have complete answers to these questions. And like I said, I didn't make this post to tell people what to think. I made this post to encourage people to do their own research, and make their own decisions. You can see the post of mine that he downvoted HERE. It's past payout, so I am not linking it in hopes that you go upvote my post. The damaging behavior of grumpycat is in the comment section of that post. There are a lot of other posts and examples of this hypocritical and damaging behavior. grumpycat made the bidbots reduce the age range of posts allowed to be voted on, but he did it in a barbaric fashion of downvoting ALL of the customers using a bidbot, whether they were within the "approved age range" or not. "Hurt the customer to damage the business". Though in this case it was effective, is this really the kind of behavior that we want to allow? Is this the kind of behavior that we want to support??? Let's apply that principal to another situation. Let's say a hospital is guilty of some underhanded business tactics. Do you go to the hospital and start killing off the patients to make the hospital give fair treatment to the patients??? That's absolutely ludicrous, right?

Please, feel free to weigh in on this topic in the comments section.

I am interested in the viewpoints that other people have regarding this whole thing.

I am looking for intelligent responses and legitimate ideas to solve any of these issues.

If you comment on my post insulting me or insisting that I am only making this post because I was downvoted, than you are part of the problem. I don't like trolls on the net any more than the next guy, but I know they are here on Steemit. This post is intended for positive discussion about real issues the platform faces. I will not hesitate to downvote the comments of trolls. However, as with all of my posts, I do value others opinions, and reasonable debates. That means intelligent discussion in the comments of my post will be Upvoted. As I said in the beginning, this post is intended as educational, not only for others, but myself as well.