2888 - If it looks like a duck...

@hendrikdegrote I do not know who he is, but he is using his SP now in promoting a blog.

Before we start a lynch Mob let's look at what this whale did.

In the little introduction he did himself 8 months ago

Hello everybody,

I was asked to wright a little story to introducé myself.
I recently invested a lot of money in the steemit platform because i am a real believer in the future potential and succes of it. I can really see this thing taking of.

Let's see what fellow steemians said about @hendrikdegrote:

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https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitqa/user-hendrikdegrote-bought-usd-25-162-97-worth-of-steem

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https://steemit.com/stats/@lukestokes/exchange-transfer-report-9-25-2016-to-10-01-2016

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https://steemit.com/steemit/@contentjunkie/new-secrect-whale-accounts-revealed-a-look-into-which-accounts-were-behind-the-massive-spike-in-steem-power-recently

pfunk · 9 months ago
The top three accounts I am 99.9% sure are new Steemit employees. The fourth might be the someone who bought quite a lot of STEEM on the market recently, but that's pure speculation.

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https://steemit.com/steemit/@contentjunkie/the-steemit-power-up-list-top-users-powering-up-their-accounts

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https://steemit.com/curation/@curie/curie-weekly-update-5th-dec-to-12th-dec-2016

We would like to thank @hendrikdegrote for delegating part of their voting power to Curie's initiative.

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These are not all but a select few posts about this whale. I am pretty sure his first language is not English. I do not know who he is or where he is from. But while a lot of us made money on steemit, @hendrikdegrote along with some others like @trafalgar and @transisto put their hard earned money into Steemit and into SP, that SP did not enjoy the same inflation rate early SP did.

So before you cast the first stone you need to remember who these people are. I am not saying not to disagree with them, I just had a disagreement with transisto a week or so ago. But when we do disagree with them we also need to give them credit for carrying Steemit the project with their funding through out the worst of times.

So if an investor wants to use his SP to promote content some deem not valuable, they do not upvote with him, but at the same time should not try to force a standard of content on him.

Will any of you mind if Coca Cola buys 10 million dollars worth of SP to promote an AD on top of trending page daily?

for those who invest in SP and vote 100% on whatever content they choose they are not abusing anything, they are using their allowed share of the daily pool, whether it's an upvote or downvote. In fact the purpose of hardfork 19 is to do that exactly. Let whales burn their voting power faster so the people with less SP will be able to curate with more power.

We should not judge with double standards. I warned about making SP unwanted and investors living in fear of using it. On the contrary, if you have it use it, and if you want to use 100% do it, that's what Hardfork 19 was all about.

• 100% voting not wanted --- do not make it possible in the code
• self voting not wanted --- do not make it possible in the code
• downvotes not wanted --- do not make it possible in the code
• bot voting not wanted --- do not make it possible in the code

I know a lot of you will disagree, but it's time we face the truth, we are changing to a community of "if I do not like it, it's abuse".

We have a great system here, yet we fail to utilize it. The best thing you can do on steemit is use your upvotes to bring content you like to the top of the trending page, and at the end of the day if what's on top of the trending page is not something you like, then maybe just maybe the other upvoters big or small do not see it your way.

I know some accounts on steemit can bring a post down to zero, no matter how popular the post is. And some steemians fall victims to this, it's easy for us to sit on the side and say "as long as it's not me", but that is the downfall of all of us...

I have called on the devs before to remove downvoting altogether or make it something with minimal effect on reward. The attention economy works by a very simple formula, SP brings content to the top, people investing in SP have the right to bring this content to the top, negation and flagging is unnecessary and counter productive, we already have a rep system to punish plagiarists, id thieves etc... , but the cost of dealing with it by taking rewards away is too high and causes a community to turn on itself.

I'll give an example, Home Depot is a popular store in the US, each store has a yearly allowance for theft or damages let's say it's set at 7%, they add this 7% to their cost on every item. If a branch has more than 7%, they implement temporary measures to reduce that below the 7% threshold.

You might ask yourself if they can apply measures to reduce it, then why not do that in the first place. The answer is simple, the cost to apply these measures on all the branches is much higher than 7%, and it will be applied everywhere whether needed or not, so when the cost to fight abuse is higher than the cost to prevent it, it is wiser to let the abuse happen, but punish customers who get caught by ruining their reputation. Home Depot decided that they do not need to create an extra burden on all their customers to prevent theft, they found out it's cheaper to let a certain percent happen in favor of better and robust service.

So how does this apply to steemit? let's say we do away with the downvoting and add a decent reputation system... SP will be the judge. In case we unknowingly upvote a plagiarist for example there are ways to deal with it. Remove votes by informing voters, use reputation flagging, so even if this person gets away with some reward, we know next time people will be better informed by reputation. Of course the reputation system will need an overhaul for this to work.

The positive side is we eliminate side picking, we eliminate witch hunting and drama, we eliminate veto power by huge SP. Huge SP can bring content to the top by simply giving it 100% upvote right now like @hendrikdegrote does which is the right approach. But we'd rather see him downvoting others "as long as it's not me"

If we do not give SP it's advertised value, we risk isolating people who believe in Steemit and who spend their money on SP.
It's easy for any whale to hide his SP in multiple anonymous accounts and abuse it at will, is that better than promoting an AD and using SP for it's full potential. You tell me what you think...