和聪明人说话应该简单一些，我们打开天窗说亮话
Vote selling is economically equivalent to self voting/circle jerking etc. Fully self voting takes 100% of the voting rewards and puts it in the stakeholders pocket. Vote selling takes 100% of the voting rewards and distributes it between the between the stakeholder, bid bot owner and vote buyer, the latter 2 arguably even less deserving than the stakeholder. Vote selling arguably does my damage as it messes with trending in the process of siphoning money out the back door, the others are just the latter.
OCDB happens to be ran at 0 profit (including curation I think), so the owners don't get anything from it. But you're also right that it does just as much harm to the system irrespective of it's altruism. We all pay the price when OCDB kicks up 1400-2200 Steem a day to freedom, regardless of whether it takes a cut. It all contributes to content indifferent voting that undermines proof of brain.
And I'm sure you're also smart enough to know that blacklists/whitelists don't do shit. Either they're just empty virtue signalling and don't increase standards at all, or they actually increase standards and lose business to other voting bots with lower standards.
Pre HF21 when curation was 25%, curve was linear and there were no free downvotes, fighting against this was futile. Why would I or anyone spend voting mana downvoting abusers when it just meant the majority of the money reclaimed into the pool will go to other abusers? The only rational move other than selling the investment entirely is to join in on the abuse. And the common knowledge of this prevented the system from self correcting. To put it bluntly, the economic incentives pre HF21 were fucking retarded. And sticking to them for over 2 years was doubly retarded.
But here's the thing:
With curation bumped up to 50%, 25% free downvotes and the slightly superlinear curve, things are very different. Sure 50% is not as high as 100%, but with all the downvotes floating around that will disproportionally target abuse, as well as middle men needing a cut too, there's not that much wiggle room for this kind of abuse anymore. Hiding your votes is also more difficult because if they're too small you just get taxed by the curve. It's been less than a week and bid bots are really feeling the pinch. Some of the biggest ones are packing up shop and pivoting to curation https://steemit.com/smartsteem/@smartsteem/new-feature-request-a-curation-review-by-burning-steem-and-sbd. They're also using their downvotes to fight abuse, similar to OCDB (who have told me they're not going to be doing this bid bot shit for much longer either)
Similarly a lot of self voters like me who felt they had no choice back then have recognized that it's no longer futile against abuse and have turned to 100% honest curation and using every bit of free downvote power we can to put a stop to content indifferent voting behavior (circle jerks, vote sellers etc).
We would like your help. I would like your help. For the first time in Steem's history we have a sensible (but admittedly crude and can easily be improved) set of economic incentives that doesn't punish honest curators the most. If we win, we can implement a largely honest curation norm on here where most people settle for 50% curation rewards and keep each other in check from stepping out of line and being greedy.
Have a look around you and see which way the wind is blowing. OCDB is already up your ass, you can try to hide in other voting circles, sell your votes, or you can step up and join me and fight for the integrity of the platform. 50% returns is pretty nice, more if you curate well. No drama, no hassle, just a very fun empowering feeling curating for what's deserving and fucking over what's not.
朋友，和我并肩作战吧！I could really use your help
RE: That de-escalated Sweetsss-ly