Alright so this is getting pretty ridiculous.

One so called "whale" starts downvoting @ocd's posts because he didn't like 2 posts or the users behind them we upvoted that were 100% going to null and promoting Steem and felt that this was the appropriate response to make those upvotes stop, even after I told him that I was in charge of the upvotes and that the @ocd post rewards only go to the curators of our team which do not control the votes of @ocdb so he should downvote me instead. Nope, still keeps at it, after a few weeks we decided to start self-voting to mitigate his weak reason of downvotes and what do you know this other "whale" starts showing up and downvoting them too, the same whale who's held a grudge over our downvotes ever since we started downvoting bid bot votes since HF22, who keeps complaining about our votes day in and day out, mostly on art as if he's a master of art and can judge if some of that content is overrewarded. Now don't get me wrong, feel free to downvote what you think we may have overrewarded but now they're teaming up on downvoting @ocd posts as if their life depended on it.

We've had this discussion a few times, some people don't agree with these curation reports being rewarded at all and that's fine, if enough people feel that way we can change our system. The real hypocrisy is when these same whales are voting for other curation projects who instead _automate_ their posts. In my opinion the border between these posts receiving some rewards are 1. They take a lot of time and effort to find these authors, focusing on newer ones if possible, checking for plagiarism and then writing a unique description of their posts in the compilation post so that the followers of @ocd can quickly see if it's something that would interest them to check the post out and maybe give that new author a follow. So what's the difference you might wonder. Well the difference is that some "devs" could easily automate this, some do by just posting daily reports of the 5 posts they curated that day and copy-paste the first few lines from the original post into the compilation. This means that these posts are automatic, they remove the "effort" it takes into creating a readable compilation post and just give the reader an image and the first few lines which often may not tell you shit about the post. Either way automated posts are pretty frowned upon on Steem to receive rewards in general, ask others and they will agree with you, if there is no effort behind it other than having created a bot that does it for you in the beginning you shouldn't be receiving extra post rewards for doing the work you do anyway and receive curation rewards for.

So today I stumbled upon the @iostkr account, which as you can see yourself is very low effort, has no engagement whatsoever and their main upvoter is the very same korean whale we tried to get to stop voting his circlejerk of low effort content on max 3 authors at the beginning of HF22. He as well of course started retaliating instantly. It's funny when it's the very same people asking for the free downvotes to be removed when they are abusing their own upvotes this way and farming Steem and degrading proof of brain making this coin more or less a worthless proof of stake shitcoin like there are hundreds of others of.

The main problem now is that those doing the downvoting of low effort content are the ones paying the piper in retaliation and other ways, this just scratches the surface of how these butthurt whales who don't want to play according to the rules of proof of brain and content actually requiring some effort to earn rewards. Their next steps could be to go after content we curate, no matter who or what that is - they won't care when their eyes only see red and they want retaliation because we decided to lower the rewards of their click farms.

What's the solution? The solution would be for projects that have a lot of stake and actively look after those who have somewhat justified downvotes and get retaliated on because of that to counter the downvotes. This is of course not easy, cause there's not a lot of inactive stake that would be up for the task and at some point it would get harder and harder to decide what is retaliation and what is just disagreement of rewards, accounts would get exchanged to make retaliation more difficult, etc, etc.

Basically I'm starting to understand why most other curation projects are just putting their heads down and pretending they don't have free downvoting power they could and should be using. It's sad but true. When you see automated reports that don't even go back to the curators be rewarded by the same people that downvote those of ocd which are not fully automated and go to the curators it's pretty funny. Some whales like to think they still have a lot of power here and can tell force others to change their ways of curating by downvoting them, some others think just because they are whales no one should speak up to them when they are being way out of line. Oh well, I am certain that these are just problems that exist right now when the platform is very young and that over time with a healthier distribution, some bigger price swings and cycles and shaking off the distribution even more things would get more balanced and that more countering of retaliation downvotes would occur. We're not there right now though.

Anyway, just needed to get that out, we're not going to change our voting behavior based on downvotes on our accounts. We're not going to stop downvoting low effort garbage content just because of retaliation and over time the rest of users and all new ones joining are going to see the hypocrisy that's going on here where you downvote posts just because you don't like certain users or cause they don't bend over at your will.