Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 07/22/18> Byte my Balls and Airdrops… it’s a matter of perspective.

In case you just came out from under that rock or have been sharing a bed with Sleeping Beauty and just woke up there is something magical taking place around here, but is it good magic or black magic? It seems that the phenomenal magic of Air Drops have been heating up the steemit community to the point that some people see it as manna from heaven and other people see it as a blight on our steemit community here.

It is interesting just how different folks can be looking at the same thing and have a totally different view on it. Then there are folks like me, who can look it and have no opinion either way, simply because I don’t know enough about the subject.

There are plenty of “experts” on here that have expressed their opinions which are most likely based on their perspective of situation and should be. Not everyone shares the same perspective or rose colored glasses though.

I read one article posted by a witness who explained just how Byteball is screwing over the Steem community and what can be done to stop it. A big issue that was mentioned was how some folks have deployed bots to rape, pillage and plunder the Byteball fields, my words not their's, but that was essentially how I read it. Byteball was offering an amount of their currency based on your steemit REP, the higher a person’s REP the more you got from Byteball.

From Byteball’s perspective I can see the logic behind that, if you are trying to gain acceptance in a certain community, why would you not want to reward the members who seem to be a little more established or more highly regarded by the members of that community? That seems to make perfect sense to me; there was just one problem with that from the article I read.
” Byteball likely didn't understand how fragile our reputation system is, and how easy to game it is.”, said the witness who wrote the post.

Excuse me, did I just read that correctly? Did he say it is “fragile” and “easy to game”? That right there should be raising some questions from the steemit community. The first one is, “what is being done about this situation?” and I guess the follow up question would be, “just how long have the witnesses known about this?”

I’ll admit that I still have a huge amount to learn here about the witness program and just exactly how things work but I do try to learn and I even listen in to a discord driven show that has witnesses come on and give some witness updates. I can’t recall this “fragile” and “easy to game” things being mentioned on the few times I listened in.

Only a couple people took this witness to task in the comments about this situation and to me that seems like it was not enough. I have to agree with a couple of them that it seemed like the witness was doing more whining about losing some referrals he might have had coming to him since there were some bots out stealing the referrals in some fashion during this airdrop.

I did pose the question of what the steem witnesses are doing to fix the issue of this “fragile” and “easy to game” REP system we are currently using in the comments. We will see if it the question gets answered. You can read the entire article complete with comments here.

The Byteball Airdrop was more of a "bite to my balls" for me; painful, since I use an old version of Windows that wasn’t compatible with what the devs of Byteball have released. So it was a little painful to say the least on missing out on the action. For me, that airdrop was like most of the other airdrops that have hit me in the past; from flying birds. They have left their mark a time or two on me, but nothing that a little soap and water wouldn’t clean up.

Maybe the witnesses could employee a little soap and water as well, along with a scrub brush, and clean up the mess we have here with the REP situation instead of blaming others for exposing it to the public.

Just my perspective, from an old man who is still trying to learn, what is your take on the Byteball Airdrop?

Until next time,
@sultnpapper