The reason the conversations are on Discord isn't due to transparency constraints but because its impossible to have a normal conversation in comments and we do not have a good chat option as of yet that records to chain. People need to be able to answer "yes", "no" etc and use reactions as they want to. Hive blog comments are not suitable for a long discussion of a few words per statement.

Spaminator is decentralized in respect to its technical operation. I'm using the word "decentralized" here as most blockchains use it; while their nodes are operated by one person they are still located in different parts of the world. As Spaminator is a very large bot, it requires several pieces of key infrastructure which is distributed.

Cheetah was a hands-off bot. There are no members to it. The only former members of the entire project (who were Steemcleaners) are myself and Logic and neither one of us is a founding member. We had nothing to do with the initiation of the project. The rest retired and have been replaced.

I think the issue here is not Spaminator or Hivewatchers but how people see downvotes. All of the comments so far weren't very much in regards to the projects but based on downvotes and the fact that they exist. The community seems to enjoy downvotes as long as they are never on their own posts. The problem in my view with how this entire discussion always gravitates to downvotes is, as you and everyone else here knows, part of the reason that the hostile takeover and the loss of Steem to privatization was successful was because one individual wanted downvotes to be eradicated from use on certain types of posts. Over the years in general the use of downvotes went from their intended use of adjusting rewards to something seen as an attack. This is a bigger discussion than any project.