RE: A response to @ats-david's post on ostracizing on steemit... flaws, loopholes..
I have been following the current controversy a bit...
What do we DO here? What is the Steemit social content platform about?
Well, it's a place for content creation... and then the community serves as "peer curators."
What is "Curation?" Let's think about it, absent Steemit for moment. It's basically a process finding, organizing and highlighting worthy content. My wife and I have an art gallery. We curate the content of our gallery... we seek out of feature excellence, help the "nearly there" on their way, encourage the pretty hopeless to practice and send the shyster and hucksters on their way.
As a community, those of us who care about that community are-- by extension-- tasked with the well-being and continued health and growth of the community. It's no different from a local town... if hooligans move in and start spraying graffiti steps are taken to keep them from doing so. Scammers are just another color of vandal.
From where I am sitting, I agree there may be "logistics issues" in dealing with these situations on Steemit and the blockchain... BUT... water chooses the path of least resistance, no matter where it is.
Even if someone determined can do all the things you say... you have to ask yourself WHY they would persist in investing lots of time, money and resources in getting into a community that is determined to make it an eternal uphill (and costly!) battle for them... especially when there are lots of options out there where people only give a very minor $hit.
But there are no easy answers....
Some people that have been involved in collusive voting have made thousands of dollars off of the process until an investigator catches them and calls them out on it. These are the powerful people I believe @ats-david was referring to in his post.
They have such big accounts that even if they only get away with it for a short period it is very lucrative to them.
So that is why my process is worth doing for them. If they can kind of play a shell game with their accounts they can make a tremendous amount of money.
Of course the only way I know to fight this is to write very public investigative blog posts when such things are discovered.
The more we know, the better we can "curate" and respond to the issues.
That's where it gets really tricky... if the scammer's motivation is to profit from the surrounding infrastructure rather than from running the actual scam it can become super hard monitor and effectively do much about.
Reminds me of days of old (back when we wrote and it was printed on paper!) when I wrote for the "Income Opportunity" press... some of the most successful "dodgy programs" really weren't all that dodgy... but the founders' independent printing company that created all the sales brochures and literature was making millions while the programs themselves were under investigation for being a scam.
Yep... It is really challenging, but what you described is basically the same type of thing that does appear to happen to some degree here.
The platform is still excellent, we just have some leeches.