Why the Binance AMA didn't do as well as it could have

As some of my readers know, Binance is pretty much the only exchange that I have openly recommended to users and used a referral code for in my footers now and then. The reason for that is because I personally trust the exchange, the way it was crowdfunded and the way they have kickstarted so many new projects and are constantly looking to improve and increase adoption of crypto. They have proven time after time again that they are very professional with how they have dealt vs hack attempts, etc. Their vision for the future to create a decentralized exchange which will run on their binance coin is also a huge plus because it will give users a lot more trust to leave their value on exchanges and provide liquidity and volume.

They have quadrupled their userbase since January in a bear market and before that they quickly rose to #2 in volume across the board and are closing in on first spot. They have great tactics to get users to use them through referrals and low fees and recently announced that they will be introducing EURO pairs to their currencies.

I am hoping more exchanges lay notice to Binance having raised the bar and that they follow that standard for creating a solid exchange for mass adoption.

Enough shilling now. ;) Needless to say I am not affiliated with Binance in any other way than having an account there and having referred a few friends to it. I recommend products that I trust myself to my readers and I try my best not to send people to places where they could end up endangering the safety of their coins.

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They recently announced here on Steem that they were going to do an AMA on Reddit on the popular subreddit r/IAmA. This is a bit of a controversial subreddit as many in the past have used the popularity of Reddit to show up just because they wanted to plug their upcoming projects. Depending on how you answer to questions the outcome can either be awesome or a complete flop, in this case though it seems like it was a flop due to other reasons than the way the team answered to questions. Which brings me to the problems of Reddit.

Here is the post:

40% upvoted.

I am not sure if the Binance AMA thread was listed in the schedule of the subreddit, I am guessing it wasn't. Which means that the low natural interest for the team on a website where most of the readers are not involved with cryptocurrencies is quite low which opens an attack vector such as brigading. Brigading is when someone uses a group of people or community to change the natural outcome of the upvotes and downvotes on a post. Although it seems that the downvoting took place after the AMA of Binance was pretty much over, it can still leave readers confused that happen to stumble on it at a later time.

Say for instance you are trying to promote your post about Dogecoin Lite in a subreddit with a lot of potential readers and investors of cryptocurrency like r/cryptocurrency. You'd make the post and then go onto your forums/subreddits/telegram groups, etc and tell everyone to go and upvote the post so it gets onto the front-page to get as much attention as possible and create the sense that there is legit interest in your project when in reality it might just be users who will benefit from a pump themselves and thus help with the brigading.

At the same time if you don't like a project because it might be a competitor or some other reasons you can do the same and go and downvote the posts to remove any visibility it could've had.

It is not enough that you just go and downvote it, but the lack of interest in general in an AMA post about an exchange of cryptocurrencies on a subreddit which is usually filled by posts about people of general interests, mod's and admins may not even notice the brigading, even if they did later it would be too late as the time has passed for its visibility. At the same time as downvoting it they can add negative comments and fill the post with that while having the same people that were brigading it upvote their negative comments and/or "FUD" so that to a newcomer it may look like something they would not want to have anything to do with.

There is a popular subreddit called r/buttcoin which has been against Bitcoin and the idea of cryptocurrencies in general since a long time ago, so long ago that only a hundred bucks investment in BTC at the time by each of their members would've given back insane returns. They kept doing their thing though, there is a community for anything on Reddit and common sense is not the leading factor in their ideals. "Some people just want to see the world burn", between such users, flat-earthers and everything else that exists lately, people go out of their way to spread misinformation or just ruin things for no apparent reason.

As you can see by the top comments, both are negatively against Binance and Crypto in general:

Brigading, combined with off-site purchases of upvotes & downvotes on posts that don't or won't gather massive amount of interest due to the subject being something the majority of readers of the site are not interested in is a serious issue. Mods and admins are not going to notice anything shady happening and there are even services that offer "legit looking upvotes & downvotes", i.e. they won't all be cast at the same pace and from the same locations.

It is sad that some people where able to "silence" the AMA post from visibility for no apparent reason but I believe it is something that here on Steem would work a lot better. Not only because the majority of our readers are also interested in cryptocurrencies but due to the fact that all upvotes and flags are public and can be checked for the reason of anyone trying to silence the post. I have talked about this in the past now and then but all these actions being transactions and public make it a lot harder for malicious actors to silence legit businesses and posts. At the same time they can work wonders when you see reputable members flag certain posts they believe are not legitimate which can end up saving you from mistakes getting involved with those services.

What are your thoughts on this? Can you come up with other advantages by doing AMA's on a blockchain than a centralized database?

Someone made a post today asking why the AMA went terribly wrong and one of the team members of Binance explained shortly what had happened with the brigading.