@therealwolf your bot?
You'd think a top 20 witness could be a little more helpful to Steem than recruiting perhaps 15 million sp and promising them higher than curation returns in exchange for selling their votes indifferently and completely undermining the content discovery system of our platform while taking a slice of the action?
You'd think a top 20 witness who fully understood the EIP, instead of pivoting his vote selling business into say a curation profit splitting business that's good for the entire ecosystem, wouldn't just double down on the direct vote selling part of his scheme thinking it'd be more downvote resistant.
I've seen the things you say and I know you're a little more aware than most, wolf. Others may be playing dumb or are dumb, but you understand what you're doing perfectly well.
You understand perfectly well that vote selling is just a laundering service for self voting. Self voting exclusively takes 100% of the value of a stakeholders own votes and returns it to him. Vote selling that's 100% of the value of a stakeholders votes and distributes it between the stakeholder, laundering service provider and vote buyer, the latter two even less deserving than the first.
You understand perfectly well that 'don't downvote good content being bid botted up' is completely misleading. Follow the money - if vote sellers can get 90% returns, what does that make the rest of the stakeholders curating honestly and only getting 50%? Suckers? Morons? Then over time you'll see a steady decrease in honest curators and an increase in vote sellers. The inevitable lack of honest curation means a downward motivation to create good content and therefore an inevitable wholesale decline in actual good content. Many don't see it, but of course you understand this.
You're not the only vote selling service provider in the top 20, but I'm starting to suspect you're a little more pernicious than most of the others. You understand all this and just let others disseminate misinformation so you quietly profit, right? I mean why not just let smaller bid bot owners like @themarkymark get involved in all the drama, focusing people's resentment on self voters like @trafalgar and @kevinwong when we've spent the last year and a half trying correct a broken economic system that doesn't punish honest voting so a working platform is even possible? Sure, just let him tank all the lightning bolts if he's drawn to drama, why get involved yourself?
And why did it take us over a year and a half to get a first attempt of a remotely sound economic reform package across the line? And we had to go around the witnesses to Inc directly to get it done. Do you want me to believe that the bid bot owning top 20 witnesses who were probably the only group likely to lose out on a functioning platform weren't any impediment there? I'm starting to think you live up to your name wolf.
This isn't just about this post. This post is just worth like $115 at the time of writing. It's just a single post. It's about what you represent. Would it be misleading to say that a vote for you is a vote for 15 million SP worth of vote laundering serving to undermine the platform people like myself invested in? Because last I checked @haejin is only self voting for 2.2m with his own stake and he's not rewarded a top 20 witness position for it.
How long do you think it's going to take before stakeholders like @theycallmedan are just fed up with wasting their time shutting down garbage you facilitate all over the chain that undermines his investment entirely? Do you think your sycophancy would hold you up forever? Last I checked you're just a couple of million SP away from being out of the top 20.
How long do you think it'll take for someone to convince Steemit Inc. that perhaps abstaining from witness voting and surrendering dictatorial power over the composition of top 20 witnesses to an anonymous 3rd party isn't really doing anyone any favors?
Tell me, if you were any other investor would you vote for yourself? Where do we go from here @therealwolf?
EDIT: I have since learned that wolf likely had been a relatively long term supporter of economic reform and my strongly implied accusation was made erroneously. I apologize for that, but do stand by the rest of the points, particularly centered around the incompatibility of the economics of vote selling with honest curation.
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It took a year and a half, mostly, because of Steemit Inc's stubbornness on addressing anything that wasn't on their holy roadmap. Most witnesses demonstrably (because there are posts on chain) supported most or all of this for a year or more and repeatedly tried to get Steemit to budge on including it in the development pipeline, only to face a brick wall (and occasional threats of using their stake to vote out noisy witnesses).
Yes, you were apparently instrumental in pushing this over the line by eventually helping to convince Steemit Inc to show a bit of flexibility and prioritize this into a release (though I imagine that management changes, mass layoffs, a community so fed up that people started talking about forking out their stake, and their failure to make much progress on their existing roadmap had something to do with it too). For that you deserve credit. At which point, not surprisingly because nearly all witnesses supported it all along, only a tiny handful of witnesses opposed any of it in any way (and @therealwolf was not one of them to my recollection).
Now on the other hand, I share a lot of your frustration with the bid bots/vote sellers and agree with most of what you have to say about that, although, again, I've seen nothing to suggest that @therealwolf was in any way involved with trying to interfere with economic improvements. He actually seemed to me to be interested in seeing it happen.
And beyond all that, this post has mostly worked the way it is supposed to. It has gotten downvoted to $24 so far and will likely go lower still. The vote buyer lost money. The vote sellers lost curation rewards. All is going according to plan so far. Let's stop attacking each other needlessly.
The part where I suspected many of the bid bot owner witnesses resisting the EIP is speculative as I have no access to the witness channel. I am not referring to the point in time after the proposal got Inc support recently as I suspect most would capitulate by then anyway, and that was the only point after which I saw support from him. 10ish months early when I raised the EIP as a package, I only remember butting heads with you and timcliff over the numbers (regrettably in hindsight, as you guys were one of the very few at that time open to actual economic reform). The only top 20 who supported it then was cervantes. When I first mentioned it 6 months prior to that (details were far less fleshed out then of course) it ended quickly when ned dismissing it, you may recall him likening n^1.3 to n^2.
The last thing I care about is credit. As you said, many had arrived to the measures within the EIP long before I even knew about Steem. From the outside it's very suspect to see that a relatively obvious set of reforms (didn't have to be this exact set, but any sensible set) would take this long. Sure there are many practical reasons, but it feels rational to suspect that impediment from the group with the most to lose from a broadly fair economy made moves against it over all this time may have been one of them. Perhaps you're right and that the group who had the most to lose were its staunchest supporters all along. I'd be slightly surprised but it's certainly possible.
You have no idea how tedious and precarious it was to try to get these changes through knowing full well that a group of bid bot owners in the top 20 had sufficient numbers to veto the motion. Perhaps the combination of asymmetry of information with me being outside of the witness group and pent up frustration over the past 20 months contributed to my overly accusatory tone.
Neverthesless, his support for economic reform aside, it was only a minor part of my comment and the rest of my points stand.