WHALE SELF-VOTING: IS IT A SCAM!?

What's gooood fellow Mastermindz,

Trust you all had a glorious weekend. Here's some thoughts from today's daily discussion over at Steemit Mastermind group.

There's always something happening in the ocean dear friends, we recently talked about minnow copy-paste comment spammers and actually had some success dealing with the spam abuse of our members. Bravo! I've recently been following @lewisjfclarke's lead by responding to spammers with wit and charm. An entertaining way to add some flavor and spam the spam. However I decided I'm not going out of my way to throw away VP unless it's outright abusive, threatening, plagiarized or pedo stuff etc.

@lewisjfclarke getting spammed about his home team.

Today we're looking up the other end of the scale at whales. This dude @jerrybanfield shared a compelling and lengthy exposé of a few of the TOP earners on Steemit. He reveals that from his position they're gaming the voting system and draining our rewards pool by carrying on some sort of a stealth self-voting scam?

It's a pretty good article and brings up some fair points and clear issues that we need to fix before coming out of beta. Things are not exactly as intended in Ned and Dan's white paper that's for sure. Warning it's a LONG read and you have to be willing to jump down a rabbit hole of comments to get a full picture. I'll do my best to summarize in simpler minnow speak to share with you the points I found most relevant.

@jerrybanfield goes detective on @mindhunter!

The counter arguments seems equally valid in my opinion. From the liberty minded "do you" and do no harm, we each have every right to vote for whomever we wish. So what if you sell votes, delegate SP, or collab with other whales to game? Then as long as no "rules" are broken in this supposedly decentralized arena then who cares?

Well perhaps a few might, though they don't even know it and that could be a problem. I mean most of us are just swimming around picking up a few SBD dollars 'n' cents here and there. What goes on in whale territory doesn't effect us, does it? Well perhaps it's more like this; we don't know what we don't know, and perhaps beyond that there's what we didn't know, that we never would have known, unless someone told us right? Confused much? Perhaps like the tree falling in the forest, we have to accept we'll never know it all.

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Ok cut to the chase.. Here's my best and certainly not expert take on the situation. Du we got a situation? SP (steem power) is how your VP (voting power) is calculated. The SP relates to how much of the rewards pool you delegate and depending on the % of VP you use equates to how much value you add with your upvote! Yay we got this so far, right?

So what's been happening far in the deep, down there where the whales hang out. Is they've been swimming around in some kinda circle-jerk formation. Posting strange comments in obscure threads, simple things like "me too" with funny memes and whatever. THEN, now here's the sneeky and kinda genius bit, right before the 7 day window ends, they upvote these comments with 100% whale power and BOOM! Big loads secretly draining out the backdoor with no one on the trending page any wiser.

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So what I hear you say, yeah I didn't really know what either? Until of course this Jerry guy suggests some consider it to be a manipulation of the rewards pool. Well ok now I'm interested, see the amount of the total rewards these whales delegate to each other takes away from the remaining STEEM that the rest of us small fish share out. Is this even right? Anyone wanna slide in the comments to confirm if this is the case? How much is the rewards pool worth and how often it replenished? How do we verify any of this is true? Is this what witnesses want our votes to do? Oh so many questions.. LOL!

Anyway that's how I've read it so far. Now the counter argument, of course that's important too right. Let's hear both sides fair and square. Well the counter is that no whale was magically born a whale, they all did something to get their reputation right? Whether they invested directly into STEEM and bought SP, or they were simply posting early in the right place, right time kinda thing. The free world accepts all may do as they like right? Do their votes cause harm to others? Is anyone really hating on them for gaming to grow their investments? After all we're all invested in our own success as much as the success of this platform.

I have to ask myself, how much have I actually invested here? What would I do in their fins? Ok enough with these fishy analogies already. So that's the news through the blockchain and I'm just doing my part to echo what's going on. Now you all know what I know, so we stand a better chance of growing together. It never hurts to know these things right? I mean it might seem a bit gloomy but if anything it might either inspire more investors to buy in or it will help us appreciate the value of our rewards. Remember most of us have never earned from any other social media platform simply for creating our amazing content.

source @jeffhiedeman

One final thought, so there was a few follow up articles I read and then from the comments leading onto other posts. One of the whales involved with this alleged "self-voting scam". What was proposed was a way to combat steem-abuse would be to remove our stake from flags, otherwise known as downvotes. This means that flagging would be consensus based, more individual votes equal harder flagging. As opposed to some whale with huge SP whacking on a single flag and basically demonetizing whoever they wish, which is how it currently is.

This seems a little problematic as we the minnows would actually have to come together, support and unify. Which we don't have the best track record of doing so far. Gathering a majority to rid kiddie porn or plagiarism seems a lot less effective than grabbing a whales attention and saying hey big guy.. what we gonna do about this? A plus would be removing stake would also mean flagging no longer reduced our VP. Flags could then be used more freely with no loss of value to those who are deserving of our upvotes. Not sure that is a good thing or not? Seems equal to the argument of removing flags all together to me?

However, as I consider all these ideas and reminisced the journey we've all been on as a platform. Watching it unfold, transform and evolve faster than a squid through the corals. I wondered how does this help in the case of the whale circle jerk? I mean there's more of us than them right? So we'd be free to flag rapey behavior with less fear of the whale sized retaliation slapping us into a sub-zero rep. While whales would still have freedom to upvote quality content, strategically curate their investments if they like and still be held accountable. Would this help balance out the disproportions we're experiencing? Or would a few greedy whales still be able to splash around in their very own VIP steem room!

source @hilarski

Oh well the brain boggles, what will come of this platform eh? It's definitely been a roller coaster ride so far that's for sure. Of course these antics are an ugly threat to possible mass adoption. For as long as there's even the slightest murmur among the small fish of any financial gaming then the scam label is gonna stick. Why would anyone from fakebook dive in our ocean? At least over there they don't know how much money is moving behind the scenes, they can just busy themselves playing farm builder or whatever the fuck.

Here it's all transparent on steemd and forever in the blockchain. I'm doing my best not to worry too much about it fellow minnows. We can swim strong together and as long as we aren't emotionally or financially dependent on the rewards then we can wait it out and see. I'm simply here watching it evolve and staking my claim to a platform that has the potential to change history.

Here exists the possibility of a fair and free world, only push the button when you feel inspired and accept that we can all co-exist together if we choose to! The ocean is abundant, deep and plentiful

source @onlyvoluntary

Either that or we put a round the clock watch on them whale and make sure we get at least a 13 week power down warning should any of the big movers dump a ton of STEEM. That way we can all jump ship together, serve us up with salt and vinegar and look back at what could have been.. LOL!

Chin up though, I'm feeling the dolphins are on it and it might take one or many forks but we can fix this and serve the whole.. we just have to find the last "missing piece of the steem puzzle".

Wholeness.

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