Closer to a year and a half, but yes not just @traf, other alts (that were never exactly hidden) as well. My self voting was likely at 90-95%+, depending on the period in question.

If only haejin and I were even close to being most of the problem in that period, there wouldn't have been a problem at all.

When you self vote completely you give yourself 100% of your voting rewards. When you sell your vote, you take 100% of the voting rewards and split it between yourself, the bid bot owner, and the vote buyer, the latter two parties likely even less deserving than yourself, the stakeholder.

As you can see, economically speaking, self voting, circle jerking and vote selling are all equivalent. They're all different forms of content indifferent voting behavior that utterly undermines honest voting for proof of brain to be possible.

We were trapped in a broken economy that paid people 4 times more to behave dishonestly than honestly, which is why stakeholders as large as freedom, all the way down (including myself) were participating. Resistance was expensive and futile and the system could no self correct.

The economic changes in NewSteem now changes this. It's no longer futile to fight for honest voting. It's no longer futile futile to fight for the survival of our platform.

I don't know what you mean by me being part of some cartel. I literally have like 1 friend here. And since the HF, every one of our upvotes and downvotes have been entirely honest, and we're no longer pocketing nearly 100% of our voting rewards. I think you'll agree that that's a good thing.