Effective immediately, @buildawhale is no longer selling votes.
Since the creation of @buildawhale, I always wanted to focus on good content producers and not spammers. This is why I implemented a blacklist that blocked around 44,000 users from buying votes. Each and every one of these were added by hand by myself over the last two years. I also implemented a Global Blacklist API that integrates other blacklists from Steem projects.
@buildawhale was also born with curation in mind, for over a year we created daily curation posts finding our favorite five authors who used our service and featured them in a daily post.
The time has come to turn off vote-selling in favor of curation. The majority of our delegation is from a single delegator and we have discussed this with them.
The few who do delegate I will send out a memo letting them know of the change although their total delegation adds up to around 500 SP.
Since hard fork 21, @buildawhale has actively been downvoting abuse and has stopped multiple large abusers completely. We will continue to downvote abuse ethically and without prejudice.
All votes from @buildawhale from this point forward is curation and without any form of payment.
The @buildawhale bot will remain on for at least a week in refund-only mode.