2018-7-7

Used up a few days worth of cheap downvotes on abandi. Hope it will help. You should find someone with a bit higher rep to look at the flagging part. I think its a big problem with vote bots that they allow asswipes like this abusing spammer to build up their rep without any real social interaction at all.

Assuming growth of SP, which is almost guaranteed to happen even if only due to interest on vests, votes should be ideally cast when the quota is as close to 100% as possible, roughly every 2.4 hours because otherwise it is a waste of voting power/influence/rewards.

If you scrolled through my comments section you may have found that I contacted most of the preminers, a few other witnesses, and at least one senior staff member of STINC, and then a few more about this abandi issue, and got mostly failed results.

For some reason it is more commonly acceptable to self upvote or buy votes on threads than on comments.
This is where the majority/self considered ethical bloggers which I feel like you belong to counteract with the human interaction part.
There is a trend of considering dan's whitepaper and bluepaper as the old and new testaments.

Personally, I feel the platform should add a "drop reputation" argument to the voting API call that defaults to true but is explicitly set to false by the steemit UIs, GUIs and WUIs. That way vote bots would implicitly drop their reputation and thus not add to the reputation for of the owners of the posts they upvote.

No clue about what you wrote here, and I would have probably opposed it if I knew what you meant.
I grew my reputation and SP while under fire, then while under fire and while powering down, and later under sporadic fire while accelerating my power down (forgot to accelerate it for 2 weeks, but still powering down, and I posted a thread about why it is beneficial: https://steemit.com/power-down/@stimialiti/you-should-always-be-in-a-state-of-powering-down)
I owe my growth here to honoring a bet on STEEM price that I lost.

Bidbots are not bad, and bidbots abuse is negligent in its harm compared to the STEEM premine that dan allowed.
If it was only him, the house accounts, and a select few of strategic developers and service providers (think roadscape's steemd.com, penguinpablo's (not a preminer and not even a witness steemblockexplorer.com) and busy.org), then it might had been fair, but this is not what happened, and premining itself is the worst kind of abuse due to the multitude of preminers, their actions and lack of actions since then, and the lack of justification of the stake in most of the cases.
If steemit.com was a sound platform, with even partially competent/decent developers, there would have been no need for a centralized stand alone blockchain explorer service that is offered as a sort of donation.