Orca versus whale (@contentjunkie vs @grumpycat)
Forewords: I'm just bored at this moment and decide to encapsulate the drama and fighting between 2 dubious accounts with questionable ethics. Since I am merely a messenger for the future, history will decide who's right or wrong. I'm just compiling the shit show into one post on the blockchain for later read. By recording timeline, I can feel the power of ancient historians pouring through me. Oh la la.
As of today, Dec 31, 2017, trending page has 2 posts started by the 2 names mentioned above. For those who are either new or not keeping up with the Steem drama, I link them below so you can cross reference.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@contentjunkie/epic-reward-pool-rapist-grumpycat-unveils-fascist-roadmap
It all starts when @grumpycat creates an authoritarian post mandating that all upvote bots need to be compliant on his/her/their new rule. The rule is stated that all bots will have to refund all posts that are more than 3.5 days and eventually stop voting on any posts that are older than 3.5 days. Given a 14 days to start, "responsible vote selling" will be in total effect. Failure to comply will be met with flagging which removes all rewards for flagged posts. Without further explanation, the post ends with a threat for flagging and issue a grumpycat compliance badge for those who would follow the new rule.
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For future social blockchain research 2000 years down the road, these are conjectures made by much more intelligent minds than I am. I include them below for further clarification regarding why @grumpycat made this. Some parts are cut out to retain only pertinent information on the topic above
From @son-of-satire:
"There is no responsible way to sell votes on a platform where the selling of votes hurts the opportunity for content to get rewarded fairly. With whales selling their voting power, there is far less reason for any to vote on a great post simply because it is great.
What are curation rewards for again?
Oh yes. So until vote-buying is no longer a part of Steemit, neither should curation rewards be. These cunts are literally receiving rewards, which were put in place to encourage fair voting, for SELLING VOTING POWER.
If all of you just stopped fucking buying votes, within a week the whales would have two choices. Start voting fairly again to get their curation rewards, or watch as everyone else's voting power increases significantly because they haven't been voting."
From @pawdogs:
"The truth is not everyone can write, not everyone has interesting information to share, not everyone is smart. Steemit in purest form is supposed to eliminate those that cannot create competitive content and let the cream rise to the top. Vote buying services dilute the pool by allowing those with little to no talent, or those that are just lazy to dilute the content of authors that can write, put in the work and deserve to be noticed."
From @reidlist:
"I agree with you that vote buying will kill Steem, and I agree that the only option is to target the sellers. They are handing out free money on a street corner. To try to convince people to not take the money and go get a job instead is just foolish. It's not in line with human nature. People would rather get $50 out of Steem today with bid bots than work hard over the next few months and get $500. You cannot plea with them not to take the money by pointing out the damage they cause, because they have nothing invested in the platform. If they don't use bid bots, they'll allow some percentage of people to still have a healthy platform to make the $500, but as a result, most will likely not ever even get their $50."
From @geekorner:
"But here we see the real reason the whales want it, because if you upvote something 1-2 minutes before it locks out, then the whales can't really be expected to downvote it. So indirectly, if you limit the vote buying window, whales could do something about it. But there are two important things to note from how this works:
If you simply shortened the upvote period, it won't really help, as the whales (or whoever's on downvote duty) need there to be a period of time between when the upvote is cast to when the downvote is given. If you simply make it all happen, in say, 24 hours, then it couldn't happen.
The voting window has nothing to do with the reward pool directly, it's more that voting by bots as a whole is disagreeable to @grumpycat here. Just that if the upvotes happen early enough he and others in his position could decide what to do about it."
Take what you can from these, but in my very humble opinion, people view upvote bots as damaging to Steemit platform since copypaste and bad quality posts will rewarded as long as they send money to upvote bots. This creates incentive to produce faster posts in lesser quanlity but greater amount. By dumping multiple low quality posts on the same day and buying upvotes spreading out throughout the week, shit posters can get a steady income that slowly snowballing into a large profit. Finally, @geekorner has some insight into why the requirement for 3.5 days is needed. Again, in my humble opinion, a post's reward takes 7 days before it is released. By limiting upvote to 3.5 days, @grumpycat can have enough time to flag/downvote shit posts before their rewards get released.
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Now that we have some understanding about @grumpycat stand, we can see why @contentjunkie is against it. @contentjunkie income stream is heavily dependent on upvote bots as he is a regular poster. It's only worthwhile to keep up with recent new and represent them a condense manner if you have regular audience. The majority of @contentjunkie post is quoted from another website article with cited source. He/she/they would add one or two sentences at the end of each post. You can view the most recent one at this time below:
I leave the quality of @contentjunkie articles to the judgement of blockchain historians. In addition to providing greater reward and publicity, upvote bots allow posts that are a few days old to be trending, which is beneficial to author as almost all curation rewards go to the author then. That is why there's a recommendation of upvoting post that is between 18 to 30 minutes old for better curation reward. This is my personal conjecture which you should not take as a whole picture. However, I believe anyone who is currently relying on upvote bots with significant amount of money will be adamantly against @grumpycat latest upheaval.
Therefore, it is only logical that @contentjunkie fires back using one of the most destructive measure against authoritarian figures, personal transaction record.
@grumpycat had consistently upvoted a post from @checkthisout which only has a single line of "SBD correction". Every single comment in the same post is "Place holder" which amasses $150 per comment. This dubious practice went on for awhile before catching wind by other Steemit users. For record, the post is linked below:
https://steemit.com/sbd/@checkthisout/sbd-correction
Multiple conspiracy and speculations pop up as who is @checkthisout and why a whale such as @grumpycat would extend a helpful hand for a new account, going as far as rewarding a single line post with thousands of dollar. Most people arrive at their own conclusion but @contentjunkie sees this as manipulation to bleed Steemit platform for personal gain. @contentjunkie also accuses @grumpycat of flagging users who report @grumpycat "raping the reward pool".
Due to the nature of blockchain being public, anyone with basic STEEM knowledge would be able to view history of action on any user. With this trump card, the orca @contentjunkie proceeds to point out the hypocrisy of the whale @grumpycat. The community is currently divided into 3 camps, those who are for and against it, and the minnows who can hardly care since they're too small to matter. There are already people who express their opinion and knowledge on why limiting upvote bots to 3.5 days window will not work. I note down @geekorner here since his comment is quite comprehensive and well-thought-out.
From @geekorner:
"My oh my. The more I interact around this topic, the more clear to me it is how much misinformation and misunderstanding is going around here. Even by witnesses. Let's try to fix some of that, shall we?
Let's take as a suggestion that you could only upvote posts for the aforementioned 3.5 hours. What would people gain? Who would lose? How would it change matters?
The long and short of it is that those who write posts that take longer to consume, and that draw an audience over an extended period of time will suffer, as their window to get paid in shrinks.
All those shitposters? They won't lose anything, if anything, they'll gain due to their pay-out being mostly dependent on the short-term anyway, and not being harmed due to how quickly it is that you can consume their content is.
So, what about the so-called stated goal of this, to curtail vote manipulation, especially by buying votes? That's nonsense. It'd do no such thing.
Let's start with this, suppose you could cut down the voting period down to 3.5 days, or even 2 days, wouldn't those people just vote at that juncture? Answer: They would. So what would cutting down the time-frame do? It's not that it'll do nothing, but all it'd do is make it easier for more people to see that this post has been massively upvoted by a bot, and give them the option to downvote it.
But if people really want to do that, they can just follow the upvote accounts and monitor them directly. It's also, sadly, not too relevant to most users, whose downvote power is too small, and who need to keep their voting power to upvote relevant stuff."
Final thought, being a scribe is harder than I thought. To record events without adding personal flare is also tough. Nonetheless, I must keep on moving so that future generation of social blockchain will take heed of obstacles that we have to overcome today. The year is 2017, the 31th day of the 12th month, falling a Sunday, we are all but cavemen with internet and social media.
Picture author and credit:
http://www.brandoncole.com/
You got a 25.00% upvote from @yourwhale courtesy of @sumdumphok!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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