I noticed something strange some time ago, unfortunately I jumped the gun with my resteem but then again it brought more attention to the "project" so it was okay. Basically there was a person who had set up an account to help aid Venezuelan authors as I'm sure most here on Steem know by now the crisis situation they have over there with hyper inflation, corruption, etc. Anyway, the project in question felt a bit odd at first glance already, but I figured it must just be a coincidence, either way I kept reading more.
After I had read everything I asked him a few questions since he was asking for more delegations, an important question was what was being done with the steem power on the account. He said something along the lines of "it will keep being powered up" which doesn't really say anything about it, so I asked if he would consider powering down some of the weekly curation rewards to aid the authors even more and he mentioned that "maybe" in the end if the project stops he would consider giving some away.
I got a bit triggered by this, not just cause of the upcoming changes of 50/50 but it obviously meant he will just keep them for himself, while asking for more delegations. But okay, if people want to delegate who am I to complain, right? Well, I dug a bit deeper. It turned out that what the project entailed was basically just autovoting some authors, the user didn't even speak the language I noticed in a comment so there was no real curation going on and as a manual curator that triggered me even more. I just wanted to forget about it at that point but for some reason I went to check on steemd and there I saw something that pushed me past the point of no return. The account was selling votes through smarsteem (for those who don't know, smartsteem lets you sell votes without delegating to it by directing your votes to buyers) and after I noticed the account had even received delegations by venezuelans, there was no turning back for me anymore or forgiving it. Didn't matter he said "it's to grow the account faster" or "it's just that not many are posting at the moment", then why the fuck are you asking for more delegations if whatever you have right now is too much already?
I ended up downvoting the post and never looked back after leaving a last comment.
It's just frustrating that there are some people hiding behind "good intentions" when all they're doing is just growing their own stake, especially in a case like this where people are literally starving and just because they may not understand the platform fully they think it's helping them.
Anyway, I decided to do something about it, I remembered a very active Venezuelan Steemian who's been amazing at interacting - don't wanna drop names just yet - but I am working on a way to create a much fairer project, possibly connecting it to OCD and not taking a 50% cut like in that case or in other similar cases some curation projects are unfortunately still operating in this day and age. It is sad but greed and selfishness exists everywhere, I guess being behind a monitor and cashing out that money without giving a second thought at the people you are letting down is easy to do for some people.
I have hope that with more people on our platform the good will start to outweigh the bad and that with the new rules of the ecosystem we will notice the bad even better and act upon it. I am looking forward to that future where everyone can feel the advantages of blockchain and the fairness it can bring you - if you give some back by working for it.
