Whilst I agree with the outcome (I said to you when we first spoke about my concerns regarding UpVu), something about all of this sits very uncomfortably with me.
It appears (so just my perspective) that a powerful user (a witness) dislikes something and generates good support with a clearly biased vote which they consider to be the opinion of the entire community. This then adapts slightly to another powerful user threatening to (not just stop increasing their stake but) remove their stake if somebody isn't stopped / removed. Threatening to dump their Blurt and lower its price if they don't get what they want.
2 users = over 10 million Blurt. Both users will profit financially from this user being stopped - one through additional self-upvote rewards, the other more honourably through curation.
What if these 2 users decide that they don't like somebody else? What if they think that mine is the "wrong type of content" or that I'm voting on the "wrong type of content". My 50,000 Blurt investment is insignificant compared to these bullies.
I also see that at no point has @upvu been tagged or given the right to reply or to change or adapt what they do before these measures come in to force. You might have done this behind the scenes so my apologies if UpVu has been given the opportunity to vote on "the correct type of content".
I know that you're busy so I'm not asking you to explain this decision to me.
I don't understand how somebody who self-upvotes at 700 Blurt per post is not damaging the Blurt ecosystem.
When I joined Blurt a year ago, I didn't like the self votes either. I addressed this at the time just as you did. There were also posts on the topic and it was discussed.
My conclusion in the end:
yes, if you don't overdo it, it's perfectly ok.
That was my post on the subject at the time, but it would be discussed elsewhere....:
https://blurt.blog/blurtgerman/@elkezaksek/upvotes
PS. Bosco must be very excited - I'm excited for him 🙂
Yes he is!
It is like he has won in a lottery...
That's fantastic! I hope that the weather stays good and they can get his home built quickly 🙂
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.