Newsflash for you! @sadkitten is not the name of the HF proposal that force people to be sharing and caring instead of selfish.

Yes, I understand. I'm not saying that you need to be proposing hard forks. I'm just pointing out that these types of initiatives don't really do much in the grand scheme of things. There's far too much "abuse" to be countered, which is the result of horrible changes to the blockchain protocols last year. I'm only commenting on the futility of this, not the intentions of those putting in the work.

Most don't know, regardless, why would you want to put the burden on anyone to search for it and then do the flagging in a time consuming and suboptimal way over simply supporting this bot?

Because just like the random upvoting bots, the "countering" bots are absent of the human element that can actually differentiate the larger, long-term abusers from the smaller and mostly inconsequential ones. It just indiscriminately finds and downvotes posts/users based on some subjective criteria by the bot creator. I just don't find that to be a practical way to address the actual abusers that most people who want to counter the abuse already know about. Automation begets automation begets further automation. It's an endless cycle of bot creation and escalation and it never cures the actual problem...it just adds to them. And it usually ensnares a lot of good/honest people along the way, turning them off of the platform while not really making a dent in the actual abuse.

Actually fear of reprisal is a reason to stand behind an organizated initiative like this bot.

But the delegation and other support given to the bot can be viewed by anyone. Unless people are actually donating via exchange transfers, the support can be easily discovered, so reprisal is simple to do.

svROI mean for that a Steemit subsidized account with 15 SP that post and upvote itself 10 times a day at precisely 2.4 hours would be @sadkitten first target.

So is this primarily looking at volume of votes to target the large but low-SP bot-nets?

Don't assume that treating minor symptoms on a per SP best efforts basis is of lesser merit or taking away from implementing a contentious consensus change.

I'm not saying that there is less merit or that the intentions aren't good. I'm only pointing out that these projects often prove to be minimally effective and can have just as many negative consequences as the current automation and abuse, and that they also redirect blame or the cause of many issues to users within the system rather than those who have made the system what it is via protocol changes.

I know that getting the code changed isn't easy (unless you're STINC and control the narrative and direction of blockchain development) and I'm not saying you guys are stupid for trying to do this. I get it and I applaud the intentions. My disagreement is only with the method and the previous effectiveness from other attempts to do the same. If the code can't be addressed, I think it would be much more effective to directly counter the well-known and longstanding larger-SP voting rings and the unaccountable vote-sellers. I still question the effectiveness of that in both the short-term and the long-run if protocols are left as they are, but, in my opinion, it would be better than another automated system of identification and targeting.

But feel free to give it a shot. I'm still interested to see the results, despite my disagreements here. I mean...I don't think things can really get much worse than they are. I hope I'm right about that!