The cost of being an abuser on Steem

I wasn't going to give them the attention with a post, cause lately it seems that's what they want since they may have given up on anything else on the platform, but since many users are asking me in DMs and in our OCD discord what's up with the out of nowhere downvotes on their comments on mine, some other people and the team of ocd curator's posts I figured I'd give an explanation.

From my perspective when the EIP hit the worst thing someone could do is discourage users to use their downvotes on what they thought was disagreement on rewards. Of course similar to upvote curation many don't have the time to go out looking for this so they delegated or follow the votes of users or projects they trust will do a good job at it. Now out of fear of having their ROI taken away from them from all that vote-trading many started lashing out and threatening anyone who dared using their downvotes on their posts whether manually or by following a trail with retaliation downvotes. Of course the majority of users who would threaten were big SP accounts and once they started hitting back minnows 2-10x harder than they ever could no matter the content it did trigger me pretty hard. Especially considering the EIP wanted to normalize downvotes a bit more along with the name change from flags and just because some people who'd gotten too comfortable buying votes and vote-trading their content up and earning that ROI + attention didn't like seeing downvotes land on their post was not an excuse to go all out war - save that for malicious/retaliation downvotes where you believe there's ulterior motives to them than just random disagreement of rewards.

Anyway to keep this short many realized what they were doing was wrong and stopped the "attacks" and I have respect for those users, especially those who as soon as the EIP hit they changed their ways and even more so those who never went down this vote-trading path to begin with, you da real MVP's.

Now some extra stubborn users still continued down this path and at the same time attempted to post garbage content they could vote-trade even though they been busted by steemcleaners for plagiarising or were on several other blacklists because of their content. When I noticed them going after smaller users I intervened and ever since then it's been a pretty annoying bother. We gave them plenty of chances to change their ways, to not attempt to gain post rewards by literal gibberish or photos going through a filter app to be called art but stubbornness is a stubborn trait.

So to make things clear, this part here is a lie, which is probably why it was edited in so late in his rambling comment:

even though most of their comment section looked like Steem from 2017 when all those bot accounts joined that only commented with "nice post" or "good" just to get a vote, I never personally downvoted the comments left on their posts. Didn't even begin to think it since their posts almost never got any comments and when they did it was mostly this:

Yes, these were all the comments in two of his recent posts, it was hard to scroll through to find them cause they are attempting to hide their history now by spamming korean posts trying to suck up to them knowing they are a bit against downvotes and attempting to play the victim role. How resteeming random posts in korean is going to help their case is beyond me but then again they barely spoke english either while attempting to run steemit "steem schools" so what's the big difference.

So what they have resulted in doing now is downvoting anyone commentating on people that called them out on their shit and downvoted them. Here's where the beauty of the chain comes into play. Say they downvote 10 comments at 5%, all it takes for me would be to counter it with a higher percentage, then they either have their other abuser friend come in and drop another downvote or they have to re-vote which as you know costs you twice the mana cause when you unvote you don't gain that spent voting power back. Did I mention they are stubborn, though? They keep on re-voting just to get those comments "censored" as they like to call it which in turn costs them more and more downvote mana and over time more and more users from the community have noticed their shitty behavior and come to counter the malicious downvotes. There is a cap to what they can downvote in terms of their combined Steem Power and mana, since they are so stubborn to re-downvote these comments after someone counters them they are now dipping into their upvote mana to use it as downvotes which in turn costs them curation rewards (you know that thing which was the reason no downvotes happened pre-EIP and enabled garbage authors like these two to bid bot and vote-trade themselves to a high reputation).

Now of course you may say oh well curation is not much now anyway and price of Steem is low so doubt they care as long as they feel they are damaging the authors they go after. This might be true but with a higher price of Steem it is going to cost them more and more over time and the longer they keep this up the less ROI they'll be earning which is what they were attempting to game to begin with, although I'm sure their motives were elsewhere as well as to keep up the image of being successful on the chain and tricking more newcomers into joining their steem school project they started and from what I've been hearing of what goes on there it ain't pretty.

Ever since the EIP they've been malicious with their downvotes, defensive of their garbage content instead of working on improving it or just writing in their own language and building up a community and doing something that could benefit Steem and their own investment. Lie, cheat, steal, repeat. That's all they know and they probably think they are being super clever now with their new downvoting tactics to hurt authors with real engagement and comments. The beauty here is that the curve has made comments pretty unprofitable in general, so those commenting aren't doing it for an upvote and the users voting up the comments aren't getting much curation out of it either. I've personally always either replied to comments on my posts or acknowledged having read them with a small vote because I appreciate people taking the time to comment on my posts and others, this is after the years of seeing authors on autopayroll that would just come in, drop their daily posts and not give two shits about their comment section or engagements. We've seen how that has worked out for our king author on the chain that boasts about his followers while his content is uninteresting, garbage and barely anyone gives a fuck to engage in them.

Anyway, these are just some small inconveniences now, they may get bigger if these two idiots happen to win the lottery and buy a ton more steem but over time still the community banding together and countering these downvotes together as to not have the authors have to re-vote themselves and waste mana while sacrificing curation rewards will win over those few who won't grow in numbers because the majority of the platform realizes what douchebags they are no matter the lies they keep coming up with. They'll continue to waste their mana and curation rewards while their reputation score is slowly but surely going to keep dropping as they'll have a majority of the community after them until the time comes when they'll give up and decide to pack their bags and start fresh. Over time I am certain there will be more and more projects, communities and users that will weigh in and sacrifice part of their curation rewards to help counter malicious downvotes for the betterment of Steem and its decent users. Shoutout to @steemflagrewards for already having a "healing" initiative in their discord but not enough stake to keep up with it, so if you feel generous then throw them some delegation so they can cover more ground - I know I will once I am able to.

To those affected by these downvotes I just wanna say not to worry even if someone doesn't come along to counter them. Right now it's kind of a bother to manually go through them and each time they re-vote but with @howo's downvotecontrol it's going to be a breeze once we automate it. Until we go there let's give these two a few last chances to go 180 if they still want to remain relevant on this platform. The clock is ticking, communities are already here along with the mute feature, soon SMT's will come along with oracles and who knows what other features that will not tolerate these kind of abusers and allow them to participate in their reward pools and communities.

They will be officially ghosts stuck in the dark/deep web of Steem where anything they do is automated and the only ROI they're getting is from SP inflating, that sounds like a lot of fun, eh! I'm starting to like the EIP more and more lately, some situations that fix themselves I hadn't even considered to begin with, nice.

What do you think, do these downvotes deter you from writing on authors posts you'd usually drop a comment on?

See you on the top,
always
Steem on

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