Every vote counts

No, based on the title this is not going to be a post asking everyone to vote for our witness although it is important to vote for witnesses as well on our blockchain! Seeing the top witness only have about 20% of (powered up steem or total supply?) in votes should try and get some people to vote more actively though, and more importantly, change them from time to time depending their own judgement.

In this post I wanted to talk about downvotes, something we have been lacking for a long time and something that is now being used more than ever and it's become a daily topic of discussion. With ocdb's stake our main goal in the beginning of the hardfork was to downvote big voting rings that were doing a lot of harm by only "curating" certain authors over and over with the content being generic, farmy and low effort. Not to mention they were constantly powering down, but that doesn't matter much and would be hypocritical for me to say, but I guess my efforts and loyalty for Steem doesn't reflect it as it remains unchanged. It's pretty funny when some people throw that at me as an excuse for being against my opinions or lowering my voice, as if selling at the literal bottom after having held at $6 and powered up 20k steem at $2 is something I really enjoy doing. It's not a race though, it's a marathon and according to current rules we still have a couple decades of "mining", let's see who's still around then.

Anyway, without sidetracking too much, our next target with ocdb was another voting ring that was doing pretty much the same as the previous user. This case was a bit different as it was mainly a few accounts it voted on, and the stake was purchased instead of delegated, nonetheless it was low effort content that even someone not understanding the language could easily spot and with some confirmation from a local we decided to downvote those posts. The user receiving some of the downvotes contacted me and we discussed the reasons such as the EIP, proof of brain, curation rewards increase, honest voting, etc and according to that user they were close so I figured they would discuss what we discussed among themselves. Some time passed and it looked as though the stakeholder started curation so we stopped downvoting.

After we announced going manual we decided to help the other stakeholders who were fighting off bid bots. The point being here is the same as the reasons we decided to go manual with ocdb. Delegators getting higher returns than curators while buyers getting free rewards no matter the content and the bid bot owners taking a cut for doing no curation. Since ocdb was mainly curated authors and the votes they could purchase did not do much for attention, in the way that they could trend with it, etc, we had good odds to be the last bot standing even when the whole platform went against all bid bots. It was not the right thing to do though as it was unfair to all the honest curation and those wanting proof of brain to come back to Steem, so we joined the fight instead. And what a fight it's turning out to be.

There are a lot of positives that have come out of this but we're just starting and I believe many will be attempting to find loopholes to avoid honest curation, good thing is that quality is subjective and once downvotes are normalized it won't hurt to throw a few around just to be safe in case certain votes are bought in hidden methods.

So even though we stopped downvoting this user, and we merely downvoted a small percentage to show them that honest curation is a lot more rewarding now, not just to not make steem look like a scam or basic proof of stake shitcoin, but that maybe it would feel good voting on others for a change instead of showing up daily to write those placeholders they call posts to just vote yourself and friends with. The user has now figured out who was in charge of the downvotes and continues retaliating. It's kind of funny cause here I was about to stop self-voting cause the downvoting from others has caused bid bots to go into curation mode (even though they have no other choice and try to snipe at 5mins for max returns instead of do "honest curation") and overreward my posts. I was not expecting this, at one point I was going to self-vote a lot later to instead reward the users curating me, what annoys me though is that he is also downvoting @ocd posts.

So in case he is reading this, those compilation and sharing post rewards don't go to me. If you want to be a baby and continue retaliating on my account then feel free to, I got plenty of content and can keep posting more often so you can use your free downvotes if you that makes you feel better. If you want to continue hurting the platform and those curating and bringing traffic into the website, then that just means some extra voting power going towards those posts in preparation for your downvotes which could instead go into honest curation. While one stakeholder took our downvotes which are meant to help your own investment with grace and agreed to give #newsteem and the EIP a try through honest curation, you're just making yourself look bad instead.

Free downvotes are the best thing to have happened to Steem, it's a way for the wisdom of the crowd in the future to police themselves and reward content, effort, etc that helps the whole ecosystem. You may wonder why Facebook content is pure garbage compared to the front-page of Reddit, here instead we have downvotes that are accountable, public and anyone is free to judge if some are worth it or are just used because you can't get your way of farming endless Steem. I'm glad they're, what looks like, curating now at least and I hope it'll grow on them, if not, then consider your recent actions to be memorable enough for people to make sure you're still doing that later on.

I'm hoping more people use their downvotes over time and we just rip the bandaid off and realize this is what it is now. We may mostly be focusing on bid bots right now as that's what the general and most known "problem with Steem" is, but I'm sure that once that is cleared up somewhat the next step will be voting rings and farming. When we get to that day where a top trending post has a few downvotes and no one gives a shit about it the same way how some people don't give a shit about a low amount of dislikes on youtube videos - we may be very close to this platform being at it's fairest it can become and others will have a hard time catching up to it.

Feel free to judge people not using their downvotes at all, those saying "they don't want any part of this" are mostly just cowards and not doing Steem a favor cause there is plenty of stuff to downvote and if this sentence doesn't get me any downvotes then I'll be disappointed.

To end this post and cause I'm too lazy looking for a shitty pic I took years ago, here's the new Two Feet song that dropped recently, the electric guitar drops harder than a 100% blocktrades downvote.

OMG WHO DOWNVOTED THE SONG, WHERE CAN I COMPLAIN?

grow the fuck up.