Hero or Villain? @grumpycat
Source
First things first.
I am not here to TELL you what to think.
I am not here to answer the question posed in the title of this post.
I am here to simply present some of the facts that I have found and events that I have witnessed. As the author of this post, I am sure that it will be laced with my opinion (one of the harder things to get away from in writing) but I will try to make it abundantly clear what are facts of things happening, and what is just my thoughts. This post is intended as EDUCATIONAL, simply to inform as many people as possible of the events taking place so that they can make their own informed decisions, and generate their opinions based on facts. Every Steemian, from Plankton to Whale deserves to have their voice heard and their feelings taken into account. Not everyone on Steemit is a bot. A lot of us are actually real people, with real feelings. Unfortunately, at the moment, only those with extraordinarily large amounts of STEEMPOWER are heard. And regardless of if those users with large stake are correct, people will support what that user has to say in the hopes of getting a large Upvote from them (this is one of my opinions). This is not what Steemit was intended for! This is supposed to be uncensored, and unregulated, and not INFLUENCED BY THE ONE PERSON WITH THE MOST MONEY AND AN AGENDA!! While this platform offers a great deal of freedom to many, it offers opportunity to take advantage, as well. Money changes people, and greed has a way of showing itself. "The Truth" shouldn't be decided by the guy with the most money.The Bidbot War
Hot topic across the platform. A lot of people are involved. MY OPINION? Not the right people, at least not in the right places or in the right ways.
There are quite a few problems with the bidbots. Are there solutions to the problem? Yes. Are the people trying to make these changes happen going about it the right way? In my opinion, NOT AT ALL!
Love them or hate them, the bots are probably not going anywhere. In my opinion, the bots and the shitposts are the trade off that we make for Steemit allowing us the freedoms that we have on this part of the internet. No censorship, no banners, no ads (though there is some argument that some posts are little more than advertisements. again, that is the trade off). A degree of freedom not offered anywhere else on the internet. As many of us are aware, with such freedom comes the opportunity to take advantage. I am not going to go into all of the details of all the ways people abuse the Freedom offered by Steemit. That would take too long, and that isn't the point of this post. At least, not this section of the post. The topic at hand is the bidbots. Specifically? Certain behaviors of these bidbots. Allowing posts to receive Upvotes after the post has reached a specific age. This is a problem. This allows shitposters to wait until the last possible second before buying an Upvote, in hopes that the large value of a really terrible post (terrible post is a vague term, but the consensus seems to be plagiarized work, spam, stolen memes etc, etc. On Steemit, we are supposed to be allowed to decide that for ourselves) will go unnoticed because of its age and receive it's large payout. The solution? Well, there could be several. Honestly, I believe that what has been implemented is PART OF a good solution to the problem. The majority of the bidbots have reduced the age limit of a post to 3.5 days. This gives people a chance to see the large valued, shitty posts and downvote them to a more appropriate value. I think that is only half of the solution, though. I think that there should be some kind of regulation on the part of the bot accounts. If the bidbots implemented a "blacklist" of sorts for people who have purchased votes on shit posts, that would also help to eliminate the problem here. This requires work on the part of the bidbots. But how do you get these accounts to fall in line? How do you get them to do something for the benefit of others...Enter @grumpycat
Hero or Villain? Leader or Tyrant? Paragon or Fraud?
@grumpycat set out to make the bidbots follow some guidelines. HIS GUIDLINES! The specific rules imposed by @grumpycat and only @grumpycat.
In History, they have a word for that. It's dictator. Does this work? I don't think so, not according to the History Books, anyway. Eventually, no matter how good the intentions, people will resent you simply because you impose your rules with brutal force. ESPECIALLY when you impose rules on people, only to disregard and break that rule yourself. While the idea behind it was noble (reduce abuse to the reward pool by discouraging spammers from buying upvotes after the post reaches a certain age), the execution was terrible. Isn't this the kind of decision that should be made by more than one person?? Isn't this what we have witnesses and large stakeholders for? I know that these people communicate, whether here, on chat, or on discord, these people talk to each other. The people running the bidbots have chats and/or a discord as well. People should be communicating more. This is the kind of thing that should involve more than one person. Grumpy took it upon himself to make this happen, by himself. While this is seen by many as a Valiant act, I think that the methods used by grumpycat could have been much better. For starters, there are a lot of people on Steemit and in the various chat platforms dedicated to making the platform better for everyone. A lot more of these other people should have been involved. But in my opinion, that isn't the problem here, either. The method with which grumpycat forced these changes (and some of the voting bots were making these changes BEFORE grumpycat set out on this "mission") is just as harmful to the platform as the behaviors that he is "trying to change" (I say that in quotes here because while some changes have come about because of grumpycat's actions, nothing is really changing if grumpycat is ignoring his own rules and allowing himself to buy these late "6th day votes" while punishing others for doing the same thing. more on that coming). Sorry, I have a lot of things to say in this post, and I am getting a little jumbled. I am trying to keep things organized.Flagging innocent accounts, hypocritical behavior, and general douchebaggery.
This is the part where I am going to have the most difficulty separating my opinion from the topic at hand.
There are a lot of other things going on that a lot of people have really strong opinions about. A lot of problems that also need solutions. Though I will be referencing some of these issues, I am not here to debate those issues. Some of them tie in here, some of them don't. Some of them, I honestly can't find my own proof of (not saying that they aren't real, nor am I saying that they are anything more than conspiracy theories), and some of them there is proof all across the platform of.
We all know Steemit is not perfect. I love Steemit, and I dedicate my efforts to welcoming new Steemians to the platform and spreading rewards to more users with my contests. I have a lot of fun, and I get to reward others while doing so! It's a win/win for everyone!! Yes, I have used bidbots. I do not believe that my content is spammy or scammy, I encourage engagement in the comments section, and suggest to new users posts that will help them get started and become more successful on the platform. I have used bidbots on my posts as late as 5 days. I have multiple reasons for doing so, not the least of which is that when I get the larger bot votes on my posts later, my followers and curators (other fantastic Steemians dedicated to spreading rewards to more users and helping ALL STEEMIANS, new and old, become more successful on the platform) receive larger rewards for curation. We all know the bots don't need the curation rewards. They already make money hand over fist selling the votes in the first place. And while I continue to produce what I think is quality content (and so do many others, otherwise I wouldn't get any votes at all on my contests) and put a conscious effort into how I use the bots, I do not see a problem with me using the bots. In the long run, I am spending my SBD for STEEMPOWER one way or another, and the rewards that I get are used to support the new users entering my next contest, and so forth. As long as other people believe that my content IS VALUABLE to the platform, then every vote that I buy from a bot is a vote that a scammer or spammer wasn't able to buy *(sound familiar? I think grumpy has stated something similar somewhere). As I have said, I understand the reason for reducing the age of posts you can buy upvotes for. I could still accomplish the same thing of rewarding my curators by buying the same votes before 3.5 days. That is no problem. The problem is that grumpycat is blindly flagging ALL ACCOUNTS using specific bots, while using those same bots himself. He has stated that he is flagging for specific reasons, like buying a vote on the sixth day of a post, while he uses the very same bots and buys votes on posts at day six himself. Is this not the definition of hypocrisy? The execution of grumpycat's plan was flawed. grumpy has made all of these claims that what he is doing is for the sake of helping the platform. Well, blindly flagging people for doing something that he himself does is not being a help to the platform. He isn't trying to help anyone. He is being a bully. Yes, it would take him a bit more time to check out posts to determine if they were spam or garbage, but again, that is where a blacklist for the votebots would come in. That is where the teamwork and actual "trying to help the platform" would come in. It isn't JUST grumpys responsibility to affect these changes. It would take some effort from grumpy AND the people running the bots. But grumpy has already stated himself that he is lazy. So instead of taking the time to see if he is flagging quality content or innocent users, he decided to just downvote every account and post of users who used a specific bot. While I am not happy that my post was downvoted by grumpycat, that is not what this post is about. I was downvoted for roughly ten dollars in potential rewards, which is not really that big of a deal, (especially considering grumpycat's massive voting strength, and he could have reduced my post to zero, instead he reduced a post worth about $52 in potential rewards to about $42). My problem is not being downvoted, my problem is the reason I was given for being downvoted, and the response that I received when I asked grumpy about it. When confronted with the question of flagging an innocent account (he gave the reason for flagging me as having purchased an upvote on day 6. That never happened) his response was that I was "collateral damage". That does not show me a person who cares about the platform.
grumpycat left three separate comments on my post to tell me not use sneaky-ninja, BEFORE the first time I responded to him. I asked him why he had to leave 3 separate comments on one post and upvote all of them for over a dollar in rewards. If he was trying to help the platform, he wouldn't need 3 different rewards for one action, let alone the fact that he didn't even try to reach out. Steemit is a very large place, and it is entirely possible for people to miss things in the big big Steemit Ocean. I actually had no idea about this "bidbot reform" until I was downvoted by grumpycat. No warning, no attempt to contact me. I would have had no problem changing from 5 day votes to 3 day votes, I understand the reasoning for that. But to punish me for not knowing about it? And to say it was for buying a vote on the 6th day when I bought the vote on the 5th day? There is a serious problem with that. But aside from all of that, the very worst behavior displayed by grumpycat, the thing that takes all of the good he is trying to accomplish for the platform and slaps it in the face before tossing it casually out of a high rise window, the thing that proves to me (this is where it becomes my opinion) is this:
When I asked him why he needed to reward himself 3 times for bullying one post, and I told him that I was flagging his comments because his actions against me didn't deserve that kind of rewards, he responded by saying "Rubbing it in" and upvoting his own comment to 163 dollars in potential rewards. Thankfully @blocktrades has downvoted that comment, because nothing about it deserved 163 dollars...
Now, like I said, yes, I am unhappy that my post was downvoted, but that was not the purpose of this post. I want people to see the bigger picture. There is a lot more going on than just my post being flagged. If grumpycat "cares about the platform" and "wants to make steemit a better place", why wouldn't he put in that little bit of extra effort to gauge a post and decide if it was quality content or spam, instead of just blindly downvoting people for doing the same things that he does? If he "cared about the reward pool and how it was distributed", why would he abuse it in such a way as to reward himself so much for being a bully? And if he "cared about" any Steemians other than himself, why wouldn't he try to contact some of the quality content creators and let them know what is going on, instead of downvoting them? I don't have complete answers to these questions. And like I said, I didn't make this post to tell people what to think. I made this post to encourage people to do their own research, and make their own decisions. You can see the post of mine that he downvoted HERE. It's past payout, so I am not linking it in hopes that you go upvote my post. The damaging behavior of grumpycat is in the comment section of that post. There are a lot of other posts and examples of this hypocritical and damaging behavior. grumpycat made the bidbots reduce the age range of posts allowed to be voted on, but he did it in a barbaric fashion of downvoting ALL of the customers using a bidbot, whether they were within the "approved age range" or not. "Hurt the customer to damage the business". Though in this case it was effective, is this really the kind of behavior that we want to allow? Is this the kind of behavior that we want to support??? Let's apply that principal to another situation. Let's say a hospital is guilty of some underhanded business tactics. Do you go to the hospital and start killing off the patients to make the hospital give fair treatment to the patients??? That's absolutely ludicrous, right?
Please, feel free to weigh in on this topic in the comments section.
I am interested in the viewpoints that other people have regarding this whole thing.
I am looking for intelligent responses and legitimate ideas to solve any of these issues.
If you comment on my post insulting me or insisting that I am only making this post because I was downvoted, than you are part of the problem. I don't like trolls on the net any more than the next guy, but I know they are here on Steemit. This post is intended for positive discussion about real issues the platform faces. I will not hesitate to downvote the comments of trolls. However, as with all of my posts, I do value others opinions, and reasonable debates. That means intelligent discussion in the comments of my post will be Upvoted. As I said in the beginning, this post is intended as educational, not only for others, but myself as well.As always, thanks for taking the time to read my post!
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"bots=bad" is an oversimplification, a fallacy. A bot is just a program that interacts with the platform. There can be good bots and bad bots but overall it is a new expression of human communication that is emerging. I embrace that idea instead of lumping them all in as something bad.
In the case of voting bots and your points in this piece I think the market will sort it out and in fact this is already happening. The solution should come organically from the community and not by some hierarchical imposition. As time goes on the bots will become more sophisticated and add value to the platform in new ways that we haven't even invented yet. I think @boomerang is a good example of this direction. They provide a vote service but it's much more than that and helping create lots of good content.
Good article, lets figure out how to make better bots instead of inventing new forms of censorship.
This! This is exactly what I was getting at. This is the point of my post. We don't need new forms of censorship. When money is involved, there will always be someone trying to find a way to get a bigger piece of it than everyone else, whether the means of doing so hurts others or not. I fully agree with your assessment.
Well saying bots are bad is just like saying "guns are bad". Well no, guns aren't bad. It is how people decide to use the gun that is the "good or bad". As long as the bots are on the platform, people are going to use them. It's unavoidable. What determines whether it is "bad or not" is "what are the people using the bots for upvotes doing with the rewards they receive?" In the case of grumpycat, he is powering down thousands of Steem per week and shipping it off to an exchange. Whereas me, yeah, I use the upvote bots, because I get more Steempower in the long run. The SBD I earn are used to buy Upvotes for OTHER PEOPLES INTRO POSTS! No one bothered to take a look at the fact that I buy Upvotes for other peoples posts, as well. Sometimes a post deserves more rewards than they get, and it is impossible for everyone to see everything that gets posted on Steemit. There is just too much content. So good posts get overlooked sometimes. When I find a really good quality intro post that is not getting any rewards, I use bots, AND MY OWN MONEY to boost their post. A warm welcome can go a long way in encouraging New Steemians, not to mention the posts that I link them to that will help them get started on the platform and be more successful. The bots aren't the issue. The issue is what the bots are being used for, not simply that they are being used. If the bots were not allowed to operate out in the open like they do, then they would sell their votes behind closed doors, making "back alley" deals and "secretly" doing the same thing they are already doing. The other issue is the people who want to troll me and say "how bad I am for using bots" while ignoring THE MUCH LARGER PROBLEM AT HAND, or the good that I use my rewards to do for the platform. This behavior doesn't help the platform either.
Believe it or not. These are the kind of things that make me believe Steemit really is decentralized and can prove to us whether theory can be put to practice.
I must first state that I like many minnows am afraid of being hit by a whale just because of joining in on the conversation. That being said, I'm very intrigued by this. First thing is him not fully downvoting you, but just $10. Was that the same amount that the dubious bot upvoted you with? (Just wondering)
Secondly, I notice he hasn't attacked you on this post yet. So maybe he was indeed just proving a point. Also, a thing I'm always wondering. How much effort did the current whales put into actually becoming one. From my knowledge they either worked for it, got delegated out of trust or just invested a big amount of money. On one hand, it can make them superior, on the other, it didn't come free.
The great thing about it, it are different people everytime. One day Dan downvotes Haejin, the next day Berniesanders leaves the Heajin discussion temporarily to tell Joeparys he'll downvote his videocourse post. Now Blocktrades downvotes Grumpycat for his/her behavior. There is a lot going on and there is no case where someone get unanimous (100%) approval from all Steemians. I also love the fact that you state your observations and your opinion, without declaring war, posting it as education.
It's great that input comes from so many parts of the community and when someone steps in to 'police' everyone, people that don't agree stand up and state their opinion. Meanwhile Ned is somewhere sitting with popcorn watching it all unfold.
"Ned is somewhere sitting with popcorn watching it all unfold."
LOL, 100% worth the upvote.
Haha.. thanks. The best part, its based on actual recent events...
Yes, even @grumpycat is generating traffic.
Strange how much rubber necking people enjoy.
Hey, it's social media, in that sense, Steemit is not different from Facebook is that perspective. In my opinion, hedonism only validates the platforms succes.
Delegation is often paid for but also the amounts of money invested, depending on the time of investment, can vary dramatically. Someone who invests 50000 USD into steemit today will have significantly less steem power than someone who invested 1000 USD in March 2017.
Thanks for explaining @youareyourowngod. It makes a lot of sense that its gets harder to grow your Steem Power when the platform grows also. I guess I should have started earlier myself. Waited over 4 months before I made my first post.
What can we do against this crook? I think so much people dont do anything against them. Iam happy about your post. I reported him to steemcleaner cause hes is using a brand he is probably not allowed to use.
He is also https://steemit.com/@checkthisout
and upvoting scamcomments. Check the account of @checkthisout to the massive abuse of him.
Dictators are bad but more worse are dictators they are pretending to be good and rip the people behind there back of.
I fully agree. Other alt accounts of this same person include @rewardpoolrape and @ieatrewards. It's all a big circle jerk, accept it is one guy jerking his own accounts.... And yeah, most people won't do anything, or just look the other way, because they are afraid of getting downvoted. What is worse than that is the people who blindly support him in the hopes of getting an upvote from the crook.
A warning from @aggroed
last month Receive 0.001 STEEM from aggroed Hi Grumpy, Thanks for investing in Steem and thanks for tossing a few votes my way. I think a lot of what you do is great, but I do have one concern. I noticed you dropped a large number of large upvotes in a sock puppet or minnow account through spam comments. Please don't do that. It's bad for Steem and ultimately hurts your investment for short term gains. Thanks for helping to keep Steem clear of that kind of voting in the future.
Grumpy was back to upvoting his "SBD Correction" comments just a couple of days ago . . .
I see @blocktrades is voting them down
Grumpy upvotes
The whole idea of "helping the platform" is just to mask what he is really doing. The ignorant cattle supporting him are only hoping that if they stroke his ego and suck his d... Well, the people supporting him are only doing in hopes of getting one of his big upvotes. Ties right in with that "greed" thing I was talking about.
New here, but it doesn't seem right to have any selling or buying votes. I am also, thus far apprehensive to down vote anything (not that it would matter) because I dont understand what it would do. Why can rewards be based on creating something good and useful (for example small advertising that cuts out the middle men such as google or facebook, based on views and likes by steemit users and the casual people who happen to find the content on a search engine). The steampower holder would still get interest or a proportional share or created blocks, but not have total control over what qualifies as good material. Not even sure if changes are possible, or if details like this are locked in forever. Just random thoughts from a new user, take them or leave them. Also, If your content gets massively and unfairly downvoted, cant you just post it again and hope for the best?
There are a lot of issues on Steemit. Some of the problems are not so easy to fix. If the bots didn't practice selling votes openly as they do, then it would be done in secret, hush hush like, and then it would be even more difficult to identify abuse.
As far as you giving downvotes, on Steemit, I go with "when in doubt, don't". Do some research on what the downvotes are for, and what they do. It should be covered in the FAQ.
Advertisement on Steemit will never happen. That is one of the points of this platform in the first place.
Self voting is an issue, but if it wasn't allowed, then people would just make multiple accounts, post with one account, then upvote it with a different account (people are doing this anyway). There are a lot of loopholes. There are people working on these issues, though I don't know the extent. But these problems are why the platform is in "Beta". It isn't perfect, but it is a Beautiful place. Behavior like that of grumpycat and his alternate accounts greed diminishes that beauty in ways that I just can't put into words..
good work sir..
What along read, but lesson learned!!
This bot is way overboard and seeing itself as a hero. I do not like that kind of attitude.
It isn't a bot, it's one guy being a dictator....
4 months ago - Behind the Meme - Grumpy Cat