I do recall you supporting the EIP after I got Inc's support, which obviously means very little. I didn't know you were a proponent for economic change beforehand.

It was only a suspicion that you were not, and if that's incorrect, it's a factual error on my part.

My self voting was a reaction to a broken economic system that punished honest voting that began end of 2017, when I had began advocating for economic change, and the voting didn't enter full swing until may last year. The people who lost out the most were investors who voted honestly.

Let me get this straight: you were self-voting yourself and puppet accounts for years before the EiP and then stopped once the HF was here. But people selling their votes to people who want to be seen and buy promotion is somehow the absolute worse?

Yes, you're absolutely correct that there's no difference between vote selling and self voting from the perspective of the ecosystem. One directs all of your voting rewards to yourself. The other directs all of your voting rewards towards yourself while leaving a cut for the bid bot owner and/or vote buyer, neither party which are more deserving than the stakeholder.

The promotional aspect of it is relatively irrelevant: the broken economy allows you to create a market where people are paid to promote. This in turn ensures that ad space or trending here is worth less than nothing, which is a self fulfilling prophecy economy wise.

The true difference between an investor who's resorting to self voting to self voting in a broken economy to defend their stake and a low staking bid bot owner who facilitates vote selling is only that the rational investor does not wish for a protracted period of a broken economy whereas a rational bid bot owner wishes to extend it for as long as possible as their operations cannot function under a working economy.

As you can tell from my tone, the last thing I fucking wanted was a broken economy for 2 years, but I sure as hell wasn't going to be a martyr and just surrender my part of the voting rewards when vote selling and self voting were rampant. Are you saying why didn't I just sell my vote instead of self vote? How dare I not offer my cut to the bid bot owners?

I'm already blacklisting left and right and this author is next.

Things are obviously very different now, but under the old economy blacklisting bots doesn't work. It either doesn't really raise standards and is just a bit of empty virtue signalling, or it actually raises standards and gets out-competed by other bots.

I'd like you to address the economics of bid botting in more detail please. Maybe I'm too harsh on you and you're genuinely not seeing the disastrous economic impact bid bots have on here, and maybe you genuinely don't see the equivalence between self voting and vote selling. But I sincerely thought that you understood all of this and were just fucking with me the entire time.

Do you still disagree?

Also, how do you see a co existence of a vote selling economy vs an honest voting economy without one subsuming the other? I honestly don't see one.