What if Blurt could be fleeced?

Is it possible for one person to swindle the Blurt system and drain an ever-increasing portion of the payouts away from everyone else? It is, and it has been happening for months.

What if ALL income on Blurt comes from something called "the reward pool"?

What if the reward pool is filled by all the Blurt Power (invested money) of the combined users of the platform, and dished out using the voting system?

What if someone found a way to drain the reward pool, taking an ever-increasing portion of the rewards for himself, leaving less and less for every other user?

That would mean no matter how good your content is, or how much support you have from your followers, your payouts will go toward zero. It would also mean that no matter how much you invest here, your witness votes won't matter, which means you'll have no chance of fixing the problem, and neither will anyone else. So hopefully the above isn't possible! Hopefully it isn't already happening...

What if there was a bot service on Blurt that sells votes in exchange for delegated (loaned) Blurt Power?

What if someone with a lot of Blurt Power is delegating it to the bot, and receiving huge upvotes on their posts, even if they are just images and text copied from other people/platforms?

That would mean less in the reward pool for people contributing high-quality original content. And it would mean Blurt's "Trending" page would be cluttered with this person's junky posts.

What if that person used this tactic to become the highest-paid author on Blurt (the largest drain on the reward pool)?

What if that person used those payouts to delegate even more Blurt Power to the vote-selling service, artificially increasing his rewards even higher, and draining the reward pool even more, leaving less and less all the time for real content created by real authors?

That would mean, given enough time, that person would have almost the entire reward pool to himself, would occupy every spot on the Trending page, would be able to decide the order of the witnesses, would be responsible for all the major decisions that happen on the platform, and would be able to prevent anyone else (except the owner of the blockchain) from being able to stop him.

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Doh!

Unfortunately, all the above "what ifs" are true, and we are already on the path to this happening. The culprit is already the highest-paid account on Blurt, using this technique, and nobody can stop him. In fact, he's still getting votes (money) from several witnesses, big curators, and even Blurtbooster.

He has just announced he's leaving Blurt ("So long, suckers!"), and begun a large power down:

But those powerdowns would still leave him with a lot of BP once completed after 4 weeks. And he is still delegating to the vote-selling bot service @UpvU, meaning he still intends to post other people's content and buy upvotes on it, draining the reward pool and cluttering the Trending page. He is also still running his alternate accounts, like @shadflyfilms, which exist solely to dish out 100% upvotes on all his posts and comments.

He is also still posting and commenting. It doesn't appear he's actually leaving. Perhaps he's going to scale back, but then again, powerdowns can be cancelled with immediate effect and no penalty, so it doesn't appear to be likely.

When confronted, the culprit has in the past typically resorted to these 3 tactics:

• pretended he didn't see the criticism
• outright denied he's doing any of the above, and then ridiculously claimed it's actually his accusers that are guilty of it, which is pretty silly considering the proof is right here on the blockchain, but projection/deflection seems to be how he muddies the water in the hopes of throwing off heat
• called his accusers "bullies"

The reward pool we all rely on would no longer be pillaged with these tactics if he actually stops, the Trending page would become more realistic and useful, and Blurt would appear more attractive to real content-creators and investors. A curse would lift from the land, and Spring would return again.

But this doesn't seem very likely, unfortunately. Perhaps if we all apply a united front against these shenanigans, he'll make good on his promise to go back to FaceBook. Curators can stop contributing to his rewards, and everyone can call him out on his destructive tactics. And if someone else tries this scheme, we'll spot it earlier next time, and deal with it before it gets out of hand.

Buying votes, dominating the reward pool, and using the ill-gotten-gains to buy even MORE votes isn't how Blurt is supposed to function. If we all did that, this place would implode. It can only work if the rest of us are suckers, and allow ourselves to be victimized this way. Time to take a strand against financial bullies who game the system unfairly and then point the finger at everyone else when they're called out.

DRutter

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_{Posted from https://blurtlatam.intinte.org}