After hearing about Steemauto's new addition of a downvote trail we decided to set one up with @ocdb as we have been focused on downvoting purchased bid bot votes lately.
TL;DR why downvoting bid bot votes.
Bid bots sell profitable votes, receiving profitable votes is unfair to everyone not buying profitable votes, everyone wouldn't be able to buy profitable votes anyway since bid bots only have so much stake to go through. When bid bots receive a bid and give you a profitable vote, they and their delegators earn higher profits than honest curators which is unfair and undermines the EIP and content discovery. On top of all of that buying votes gives the purchasers an unfair advantage to beat the taxing curve compared to everyone else.
If no one bought votes, bid bots are forced to curate, which we have seen them do lately more and more. Since we can't stop them from selling, we have to discourage buyers from buying, luckily most people seem to understand this and are all in for testing #newsteem and the EIP as most bid bot votes we downvote are generally only purchased for the profit hoping no one will downvote them before payout is due and the quality is mostly very low.
Anyway, if you aren't using your downvoting mana and aren't afraid of some random account retaliating on you, then head on over to https://steemauto.com, give them authority through steemconnect and search for us in the "downvote trail" section and follow with a certain downvote percentage. We will not let our downvote % go under 0 and it won't take from your upvote mana.
If you like the way @ocdb curates, following our previously known "whitelist" and curating them manually based on content and plenty of other factors among other things such as onboarded content creators and a hand of smaller curation communities then feel free to also follow us on the "curation trail" if you are a passive investor/user who doesn't have time to curate.
Here you can see our voting activity in the past 30 days
After a few "counters" of retaliation downvotes on curation initiatives from curangel and theycallmedan we decided to leave countering be for now and just focus on curating.
We understand if you don't want to follow our downvote trail, there has been a lot of retaliation on damage on our personal accounts and the post rewards of the curators at @ocd as well but that's the price you have to pay to try and change steem for the better.
We appreciate your support either way and thank you for reading.
Post rewards going 50% to @ocd curators and 50% to steem.dao.