Hi, thanks for your concerns, sorry for the delay in response have been trying to launch Digchain and Gamestate, both of which give airdrops on the Blurt community.
I don't really see what any large user can do, the foundation runs the blurt.blog and wallet frontends and we have the final decision on when such actions are taken, we are not swayed by large holders of Blurt, I'm not impressed myself with threats of dumping, but I do believe the market is strong enough to handle it, and it would be their loss and would help in distributing Blurt.
I have suggested that such future lobbying be done neutrally via the @blurtoffical account with an unbias request for vote, where the user does not know the stance of the foundation on it. This would be preferable to a whale posting and skewing the vote because users want upvotes or witness votes from that person.
In this case we did not feel the need to consult upvu as the content being voted on was clearly poor and PLG, there is simply no excuse for that.
Regarding self-votes, we have different philosophies here, we didn't carry over some of the stigmas from Steem, we have a view that if people paid for their stake with funds or via "sweat equity", they should be entitled to use is however they wish, so the occasional self-voting is perfectly fine if balanced with curating others, we don't police that, nor do we have a way of policing that at present, so please feel free to self-vote, of course I don't speak for the entire community, some may not like self-voting.
I'm a bit old-fashioned, I don't self-vote at times, sometimes I do, the cool thing on Blurt is there are more freedoms and less judgement.
Thanks for taking the time to reply - I appreciate you're busy and I didn't expect you to. You're a hard man to ever disagree with.
This experience has left me with a rather bitter taste in my mouth and I'm pleased to see that future decisions like this will be approached differently, although in this instance, it appears that the heavyweight bullies have "won", irrespective of whether it's the "correct" decision or if the same decision would have been made via a route with more integrity.
In response to my disagreement (vote) that delegations should be stopped (as with others who opposed this point of view), I had supporters of the movement challenging me - akin to the "democratic" polling stations previously experienced in countries like Zimbabwe where people would stand outside with their machetes.
This naturally discourages others from voicing their unhappiness with the approach and as you say, one particular whale has continued to upvote his supporters which encourages them to continue this behaviour (didn't President Mugabe do this too?) So if a vote is ever proposed by @blurtofficial, I suggest that this kind of provocation / bullying (through lack of better word) is prohibited.
I'm afraid that I'll always be opposed to self-voting (so perhaps I can disagree with you on something). Whereas upvoting services only benefit the upvoting service and the user being upvoted (at least 2 people benefit with this approach), a self-upvoter only ever benefits 1 person. No matter what excuses they have for doing it (they upvote 400 other posts before upvoting 100% of their own content), it's a selfish act and to me, that's contradictory to the idea of community.
I totally agree that self-voting is a selfish act, but capitalism and making money for ones-self is also a selfish act, if you are self voting to give yourself more visibility so your words can reach others and have a positive impact, I don't see a problem with that. Voting only a small group of friends is just as bad as self-voting I guess.
I am very familiar with dictatorships swaying votes with threats and even sweeteners like buckets fo KFC for voting for their party, Blurt actually needs a way to vote anonymously. Maybe using a privacy chain and attesting ones blurt account on it and broadcasting a secret vote tied to one's blurt power weight, not sure how that would look, but yeah it needs to be done in a way that anyone can vote without feeling afraid they will lose witness votes or regular support from whales.
Great finally someone who's doing against this service something👍
VgA
Great response and reminds me why I love this community.