About a month ago I wrote a post about whether flagging is censorship or not and in my understanding, no, no, it is not. This week I read what I would consider, a bloody stupid post by Jerry Banfield making a call to hardfork flagging out because of all things, price.

Not only that, he wrote this gem of a paragraph:

Therefore our best option to communicate how much we disagree is to power down and sell Steem to lower the value as much as possible to motivate those holding on forever to make whatever change is necessary to keep the people happy and to allow those buying in to have more influence per dollar invested. I have been powering down and selling for nearly two months now prior to making this announcement and intend to sell all the rest of the Steem I have bought (about 40,000 more) this year until the ability to downvote on the blockchain is removed.

 
Oh My fucking God.

The problem with his 'sell Steem' approach is that the people who have significant amounts of Steem to sell are generally wise enough to investigate first to protect their investments. Those who may actually take this advice are those who don't have much and do not understand markets... perhaps Jerry will sell them some market advice. These people are also likely the ones who can't afford to take a loss. That is pretty cruel Jerry.

From the moment Jerry walked onto the platform, he has done nothing but screw up and the multitude of his claim to fame, his onboards, are only here because they thought it was a get rich quick scheme. His entire false persona (it is engineered in my opinion) is to appeal to the lowest common denominator and those who are desperate. Like the Jehova's witnesses who knock on the door after the loss of a family member.... get them at their weakest. Yes, that happens.

Sure, Jerry's posts get to trending because of bidbot votes but, there are still many hundreds of organic votes coming from 'real' users and, that wasn't always the case. Even the ones who are now flagging him have to take responsibility because, he was welcomed in with open arms and phat votes that pushed him into Trending in the first place because of... um what? He was never anything more than a get rich quick scheme seller and it was obvious from the get go, let alone after the many very public scams he has pulled over the last year here. Jerry is what happens when you invite a vampire into your home.

We live in a world where populist politicians who speak for the little guy are able to assume power because they are able to connect with people's grievances and and shortcomings and say, here is your problem and point them at an enemy. It has been happening for a long time, well before those 'little guys' were able to even read. For Jerry, the little guy's enemy seems to be the same enemy he has which is to be expected since so many of the people he brought in are similar to himself. He can probably single-handedly take the prize for why retention is so poor here.

But, it isn't Jerry's fault

This is the issue with it all, Jerry is an opportunist and the opportunity only exists because of the ignorance of the people who support him. If the people he calls we actually listen to his advice, perhaps they actually deserve some pain out of ignorance and greed, just like those who knew Bitconnect was a pyramid scheme and still bought in. How many times can people be warned about what is either a severely disturbed mind or a sociopath before they steer clear? It is like all of those people still upvoting Haejin in either support or to frontrun, you are a big part of the problem.

I have been powering down and selling for nearly two months now prior to making this announcement and intend to sell all the rest of the Steem I have bought (about 40,000 more) this year until the ability to downvote on the blockchain is removed.

 
This is the desperate move of a small mind who rather than admit he was wrong and do the work to correct it, is doubling down and, doing his demented best to pull others into the same spiral. Not too many weeks ago the person who wrote these words was a top 20 witness. How is that possible? If anything is hurting the price of Steem it is people like Jerry being supported into public roles of trust and responsibility. I hope he powers down and out and never comes back.

Everyone makes mistakes, everyone is capable to changes of mind and I normally suggest people be very charitable in their views of others but, this post just went too far as it is trying to obviously take advantage of people who aren't going to do the work to actually understand or, those who don't want to understand. Can you imagine if there was no flagging? Can you imagine what your favourite tags would look like as spammers and plagiarists fill the feeds of anywhere they think they can get a couple cents?

At some point, the community aspect of Steem needs to start waking up to the realization that people like Jerry are only able to operate here because they get supported to operate here by the community itself. This is the thing, Jerry has almost 40,000 followers. The community gave him his soapbox.

It is Sunday night and it is quiet. Perhaps it is because of the flags...

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]