First I wanted to thank @meno and @therealwolf for taking my question during their @dlive post which can be found here:
https://steemit.com/dlive/@therealwolf/907d9d74-9b3c-11e8-9e1e-0242ac110003
This was my question:
“What will you do about whales that abuse the platform and its users? I am talking about the Ranchorelaxo and Haejin self voting scam that allows this user to get rewards far above what other similar content is getting. If the community tries to flag this content, he tries to destroy their accounts with retaliation flags.”
I didn’t want to respond to this too quickly as the flag wars were still burning hot and I wanted a calmer time to discuss this rationally.
In response to my question, @therealwolf mentioned a number of points:
“Heajin is using the current system”
In the English legal system, we often talk about the law and the spirit of the law. As much as the protocol may allow a large steem power holder to upvote posts far above it’s relative value, we must ask if this is in the spirit of the “law” we have here on the steem blockchain.
The protocol also allows flags to reduce the value of posts where the community feels the rewards are higher than they should be.
The immediate problem is that people are afraid to flag Haejin as he will retaliate and flag a users posts - not one or two, but all of their posts and comments until there reputation is well into the negatives. Would you say this is someone just using the protocol or would you say this is the type of behaviour that we as a community should decide is not appropriate?
It is the combination of votes and flags that allows the “proof o brain” to reach consensus on what posted content is worth. When a whale upvotes their own posts and threatens others who dare to flag it, this system breaks down.
If we allow this, then the steem blockchains consensus protocol has failed.
If this happened with Bitcoin where one large miner was able to threaten others to accept his block so he could receive the block reward, we can all agree that the Bitcoin’s proof of work consensus would have failed, at which point the blockchain is worthless.
If the steem blockchains consensus mechanism is being held hostage, is it any surprise that a lot of users are losing faith in the platform and looking at other up and coming platforms?
“Haejin gets voluntary votes from Ranchorelaxo”
We now know that Haejin controls the Ranchorelaxo account. This means, not only is he self voting from his account, he is “self-voting” from his second account.
You can see the evidence here:
https://steemit.com/busy/@kabir88/guess-who-paid-moeknows-a-visit-then-promptly-tried-to-hide-their-footsteps-on-a-blockchain-rotfl
Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if the value of the rewards were corresponding to the content. Most sensible people would agree that a one line comment shouldn’t be getting a $100+ reward.
I wrote about this and was promptly flagged by haejin. You can find my post here:
https://steemit.com/haejin/@kabir88/haejin-watch-still-abusing-steem
“Ranchorelaxo has the right to use his steem power how he sees fit”
I agree, but we should also have the right to use our steem power how we see fit and flag bad content, without the content creator then attacking those users with retaliatory flags on all their posts, irrespective of their content value.
I wrote this blog here to show how important flagging is in reaching consensus on the right value of content:
“Change the system”
No one user has the resources to do this, so I would like to see a more community led approach. I am really happy to see projects like @steemflagrewards that rewards users for flagging bad content. I hope more people become aware of this and the larger steem power holders are able to delegate some steem power to support this great project.
I have also seen a new project that @jaki01 is supporting called @steem-ua, this looks really promising. Hopefully those of you who have programming skills and steem power can contribute to this effort.
I have also tagged in the following people who may find this post of interest:
@transisto @timcliff @sircork @fulltimegeek
Some of you may be wondering who I am. Here are some of my recent posts:
https://steemit.com/upvoteplankton/@kabir88/upvoteplankton-my-new-initiative?sort=new
https://steemit.com/dlive/@kabir88/3efeb030-86a3-11e8-adb2-bf4283a63cb9?sort=trending
Yes - these are a bit old, but why create content when most of it is hidden after haejin flagged my account to -11? @fulltimegeek and his army of bots have helped, but it's a long way from -11 back to even 0 where my content would be visible again.
And a timeline of haejin’s activities and how I earned by -11 reputation score!
https://steemit.com/truth/@moeknows/haejin-timeline-updated
I hope we can continue the debate and find a solution for this problem. Even if Haejin voluntarily changes his behaviour, how will we stop the next person who chooses to follow this formula?