Why the Whale War might be good for Steemit

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In case you haven't heard, there has been a bit of a controversy waging on steemit over the past few months. The main belligerents in this so-called war are two users named @haejin and @berniesanders. Others have also participated in various forms. I myself have taken part in many of the discussions regarding the spat.

One opinion I've often seen expressed is that the drama of the war has a negative effect on Steemit and scares away new members. The overall sentiment is that it is bad for Steemit and Steem as a currency. While I have held this opinion myself in the past, I recently started to question the veracity of that statement. By stepping back and looking at the situation from a different angle, I have allowed myself to consider that the war may actually be good for both Steemit and Steem.

Background

First, i wanted to give some background on what the war is about in case you haven't been paying close attention. The controversy began when someone noticed that one user was taking a large portion of the reward pool themselves. That user, @haejin, was taking .6% of the total reward pool at the time. Since that time, this figure has grown to 3.187% at the time of this writing Source.

Upon investigating, people discovered that most of those rewards came from a mysterious whale (@ranchorelaxo) with an upvote worth of over $300 that had very little interaction with steemit other than upvoting @haejin’s posts. The situation is compounded by the fact that @haejin routinely posts 7 or more posts a day, all upvoted by himself (@berniesanders made a post about it, and thus the flag wars started. There have been many minnows and plankton/redfish on both sides that have taken huge hits to reputation. The whales involved have each taken turns wacking each others rewards down. There were also reports of threats beyond Steemit to include death threats.

The main argument against @haejin is that the relationship between him and @ranchorelaxo and subsequent behavior constitutes voting abuse as outlined in the Steem White paper. While @haejin asserts that he is entitled to the large upvotes from himself (currently up to $114.89) and @ranchorelxo (currently up to $338.93) and the resulting high portion of the rewards pool because he offers his analysis on steemit for free and brings many new members to steemit.

Reasoning

So how can I find anything good about this situation? Well, first I had to look at the white paper and see what the design of Steem said about this. In the section on voting abuse, it says the following:

...any work that is getting a large concentration of votes is also gaining the most scrutiny (publicity). Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders.

So analyzing this section of the whitepaper, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that war taking place right now is not only tolerable, but in fact a healthy correction working very much in the way that the currency was designed. You have two large stake holders collectively allocating a large percentage of the rewards pool and yo have the community (many smaller stake holders) responding.

Some will look at the situation and say the system isn’t working because @haejin is still taking a large portion of the reward pool. This is a fair assessment, however, if you continue reading the Steem white paper, you will see the following statement:

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

I bolded that last section to highlight its importance. While @haejin may be successful thus far, the response from the community helps ensure that the abuse doesn’t reach a level that makes the currency unstable. While the end result of the abuse may mean less rewards for other posters on Steemit, the response ensure that the rewards they earn now are not devalued because of the abuse. Additionally, it also serves as a warning to other millionaires considering such actions. They know that the community will react and can see the potential for larger whales getting involved. Besides a considerable monetary investment, they will also have to invest time and energy in a war, which makes the effort necessary to pull off such a plan less enticing.

What about Steemit as a website?

For this question, I’ll refer to @ned himself. In a recent comment, @ned mentioned the incredible amount of web traffic generated by the spat. They have a saying that no publicity is bad publicity. I think it rings true in this case. I still feel that steemit offers many more communities and conglomerates of goodwill than most social sites. The ugliness of the flag wars is the exception, and I think that’s easy for a lot of people to see. The social transactions on the Steem BlockChain and the resultant condensers (i.e. steemit.com, busy.org, chainbb, etc.) are unlike anything else on the planet. It’s an interesting phenomenon and is something of which the world should take note. If it takes a bit of controversy to make that happen then so be it. Steem on!

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Please let me know your thoughts below, but remain respectful.

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