RE: Q: Is @berniesanders good for Steemit?
Pros
Well, if you consider actions like flagging @heajin for raping the reward pool and pointing out and flagging things he considers to be bullshit, I love him for that, even when he did it to me. I've also seen him upvote cool shit that he likes including a couple of my posts and support good projects so he is obviously good for steemit for those reasons.
I've seen him piss a lot of people off too, including myself, but that's actually a cool thing sometimes in my opinion. In fact, his behavior has been the clearest sign of a truly decentralized community that I have seen.
Cons
I think the whole vote buying phenomenon that he pretty much started is not good for steemit. I mean it's the most profitable way to work with the platform in the short term right now so I can see why it's done, but if it gets to the point that good content isn't the driving force anymore that would ruin steemit in my opinion and I feel like we have moved that direction with all the voting bots.
In a nutshell: In complexity theory @berniesanders is the shepherd of Steemit's bad actors. He constantly mutates between good shepherd and naughty sheep. Sometimes all you can see is sheep. Sometimes all you can see is shepherd.
All people are a mixture of good and bad and I, personally, haven't got a problem with that. I do, however, have a problem with hypocrisy.
You had your own private vote buying whale, but why can't BernieS, or anyone, explain why that's different from the public vote buying schemes?
The way I see it: quality isn't a valid argument because there is no quality control on most vote buying schemes. Scale isn't a valid argument because there are many people using publiv vote-buying to vote themselves up to $500+. Also, I understood that the services were for minnows, but dolphins e.g. kaylyinart use them to massively up-vote themselves too.
Steemit has problems, and it seems to me that demonising a handful of individuals, like mindhunter or even haejin is never going to solve the problems.
I understand voting bots , I don't understand people giving hundreds of dollars to someone just because they are "popular" , I imagine I will never know why the herd do what they do.