I was reminded of an activity between a couple of accounts today that kind of made me a little sad. The things that people do to earn and what looks like extract extra from the ecosystem at the cost of others. Feels like we forget that we're all in this together but I guess we don't all share the same longterm vision.
It often makes me wonder what goes on in people's minds where not only do they choose to do this but to continue for so long, something that looks quite literally like stealing returns from another account due to their ongoing negligence.
Now I'm not trying to just paint people in a dark light, but so much time has passed that it's become a bit weird and at this point other stakeholders have noticed it and since the negligent account isn't fixing it to avoid this to continue from happening, downvotes have now started occurring which just makes it bad a bad user experience overall.
Let's imagine this scenario for a minute instead of me pointing out who the accounts in question are to give you a better picture.
Let's take @ocdb for instance, it's quite a big account but the stake isn't mine.
Now let's assume @theycallmedan has asked me to help curating @threespeak content and authorized his posting key for me to use.
Knowing how the curation reward window works in the current stage, I would then decide that I'm going to create a list of the accounts that I'm going to vote, vote them with @ocdb within the 24h window, but then vote them with theycallmedan's stake a day or two or three later.
To outsiders this may not seem like an issue, but over time this means that ocdb's curation rewards would increase while theycallmedan's returns would decrease. Ocdb would quite literally take a large portion of his returns because he's been voting late.
People may go to Dan and be like "hey mate, we've noticed you're voting on posts super late and it's costing you quite a lot, would you mind voting on the first day instead to prevent this front-running?" to which he'd say "nah I don't care" or something of the likes (not sure what exactly the position the real account is taking here).
The thing is, I wouldn't do this personally because it'd be quite immoral to purposely take returns from another account this way. It's even worse considering ocdb's stake isn't mine so I'd be lowering the returns of a stakeholder who quite literally has bought his stake which is the same as what's happening in the real scenario today.
You may ask how this can get any worse? Does it matter that the account that's taking returns from the account that's purchased hive is constantly selling them? I'm not even going to get into that.
Since no attempts have been made after many years to fix this voting window issue so that the 2nd account can't "take" rewards from the previous, other stakeholders are now using their downvotes to combat this unfair APR the 2nd account is receiving. This is now leading to authors asking why they're being targeted by downvotes and generally leading to quite shitty ux.
You may think that "ugh the downvoter is the bad guy, he should just let it be if account #1 doesn't care that account #2 is "stealing" their returns", but there's more to it than just that.
Since this is something that's been ongoing forever, it also causes other accounts to go in the same position as #2. For instance, if I was someone who'd only be interested in increasing my APR no matter the cost, I could simply trail the votes of #2 to get a piece of the pie at the cost of account #1. Furthermore, it leads to a lot more rewards going to posts chosen by accounts #1 and #2, to a point where you start to suspect account #1 doesn't care that their returns are lowered as long as their community is getting more author rewards by sniping their votes with more and more stake.
There's a lot of other things going on but just thought I'd share my thoughts on this real quick.
For instance there's probably a lot of stake that's simply not voting at all anymore cause their bots went inactive or a service stopped operating, this leads to everyone active here today and not sitting at 100% voting power getting higher returns from curation rewards because of it.
I just don't understand why after many contacting attempts even from my side this is something that's been left to occur, especially when the account being taken advantage of has mentioned that they could use more funding for their product on this chain. I hope they'd listen and fix this to prevent any more downvotes or advantage-taking from happening in the future.
