I have held back from writing such a post. A post really that I did not want to write, but now I feel it is time that maybe I should. The reason being to make readers aware the currently there are problems on the platform, steemit is not the utopia the people may think that it is.

So you guessed by the title what I am talking about.

But before I start to talk about my observations and what is going on when ever I write such a post I like to use FACTS. Because you can't argue with facts, these are things we can depend on as true information, you might deny it, but if people can see the facts for themselves, they will come to the same conclusion pretty quickly.

And thats the amazing this about steemit the transparency, whether we like it or not we can see most things on the platform. Voting history, payouts, comments that were left its all there for us to see.

Now I have not gotten involved in the whole grumpy cat scenario, personally because my true beliefs are to help the platform grow. To encourage people to join steemit for some of the fantastic people it has on the platform. Not for some people who don't seem to have much to do other than throw a spanner in the works for some little minnows who are just trying to get by and make some cash.

Lets take a look when all this started.

4 months ago grumpy cat came on this scene with a post entitled Warning to vote buyer/sellers! - Introducing GrumpyCompliance, mandatory in 14 days. (No more post-promotion allowed past 3.5 days)

So basically what was happening was that people were able to use bidbots to upvote their content regardless of good or bad. What was worse was that many were leaving the voting until day 6 to vote so they had 24 hours for a payout and were receiving high rewards as a result of it.

Grumpy cat took it upon themselves to do something about it, and having a high amount of Steem Power threatened to start downvoting some of the top posts that the bid bots had rewarded. And in turn the post received a high reward payout

So the post recieved £1309.45 in SP and SBD, there were 443 comments and over 6000 people viewed the post.

Reading the comments there were mixed views, but over all people were inclined to agree with the idea in the hopes that it would reduce people spamming and making use of the bots. In turn a large majority of the bot owners agreed and implemented the rule in turn this in theory should reduce the amount of bad posts that were being made on the platform.

Grumpy cat went on for a few weeks naming and shaming such people who were using the bid bots for selfish reasons posting bad content and getting high upvotes from the bots. Fair enough it was their own money they were investing in, but the hope that steemit was to be used to promote quality content was fast becoming a thing of the past.

But what people also noticed is that he or she was upvoting their own comments.

So in effect if someone posted up a crappy meme it was wrong, but if grumpy cat posted up comments like this...

and this one....

and this one..

....then grumpycat cannot see any wrong doing, even though this is far from effective curation and as some would put it reward pool rape.

Credit Giphy

So the story continued when about a month later grumpy cat posted up this Non-GumpyCompliant vote sellers are now to be used exclusively to profit from the reward pool!So more or less what Grumpycat was saying in this post is the latter of the bid bot owners had accepted his or her demands, bar one @sneakyninja who refused to give in to the demands asked for.

So grumpycat made an announcement.

He or she said that any minnow using a non compliant grumpy cat bid bot would get flagged by them, thus the author losing all their rewards for the post. And true to his or her word that is exactly what began to happen. One the platform we started to see lots of comments like this one....

So there we have the beginnings of what was supposed to be something to help stop bad posts and help decent content curators get more recognition.

But sadly it did not stop there oh no far from it. It would appear that regardless of who it was, that chose to break this rule that grumpy cat made would be flagged. At the time Grumpy Cat had a lot of voting power, and while he or she continued to flag accounts rewarded themselves with nice fat upvotes on their own comments.

Further more Grumpy Cat set up an additional account madpuppy, and pumped money into the account to also look to flag (non compliant) posts which were not following grumpy cats demands. Grumpy of course upvotes all mad puppy's comments and mad puppy upvotes all of grumpy cats comments in addition to their self upvotes.

Notice I have not put a picture of grumpy cat up.

We dont know who grumpy cat is, people have called out to ask for he or she to reveal their identity but as of yet this information has not come to light. However I am not sharing the picture, because they are using a trademarked name which is patented see the below articles for more information.

Woe betide those who violate Grumpy Cat’s intellectual property

GRUMPY CAT - Trademark Details

Grumpy Cat wins $710,000 payout in copyright lawsuit

So maybe I could use this photo of a blood sucking leach in its place perhaps, while respecting the true Grumpy cat's patented rights.

source

Grumpy Cat cannot be reasoned with.

(Credit Pixabay)

Many people have published open letters to the cat to try to reason with them, but to no avail. Take a look at some of the posts that people have wrote in the past few months, all have tried to reason and did not get very far.

Open Letter to @GrumpyCat Credit @firedream

Dear @Grumpycat Credit @snook

Dear Grumpycat (You Flagged my post for the wrong reasons I AM INNOCENT and now You Flagging another INNOCENT Users) PLUS A RAP BEEF VIDEO to @grumpycat
Credit @marshalllife

This is just a sample of some of the letters sent after the damage caused to their accounts.

So what started out as something potentially good to stop spammers posting, hard working authors using bidbots that grumpycat did not approve of were being flagged. And with that he or she broke their own rule and downvoted anyone who used the bidbots who did not follow their compliance. So even posts that were up for a few hours, were flagged some even to zero.

Grumpy cat appears to be becoming a bully.

(Credit Pixabay)

Because of the abuse that was occurring a new group was formed called the resistance its primary mission to eventually overcome the flags placed by grumpycat so that the scales tipped back into the authors favour.

So in turn everytime grumpycat would downvote a post, the resistance would muscle in and upvote it. Ok it did not make much of an impact to the post, but the resistance was and is there, and it seems to be growing.

Grumpy cat did not like that.

Because people were and still are not delegating to the resistance to help build its steempower thus its upvote value. So grumpy cat decided to flag any steemian who had delegated to the resistance. Here is an example from a member explaining more about what has happened.

GrumpyCat's Attack Dog Strikes -- Or Another Group I Support * Credit @shadowspub*

So Grumpy cat has now gone from his or her original demand with bid bots, to attacking those that choose to defy their demands.

So now you are in the picture here is the most recent turn of events happening.

I happened to stumble across a comment that mad puppy repeated a few days ago, which caught my attention and said the following.

Witness @drakos has recieved a delegation from @wackou, drakos is a witness and does a lot for the platform. After all his hard work he has been rewarded with some delegation and rightly so. But at the same time Drakos has downvoted some of grumpycat and madpuppy's post.

Grumpy cat does not appear to like that.

And made a point to spam posts with the same comment because of the flags and the posts become hidden. I see that Grumpy cat is talking about censorship, had he have reminded him or herself about the white paper it says and I quote.

Censorship
Steem is a decentralized network that is operated by witnesses in jurisdictions around the world. All user actions are publicly recorded on the blockchain, and can be publicly verified. This means that there is no single entity that can censor content that is valued by STEEM holders.
Individual websites such as steemit.com may censor content on their particular site, but content published on the blockchain is inherently broadcast traffic and mirrors all around the world may continue to make it available.

Freedom of speech is the foundation of all other liberties and any infringement upon freedom of speech undermines the only peaceful means of reaching consensus: discussion. Without free discussion voters cannot be fully informed, and uninformed voters are a greater threat to society than losing the right to vote.
Censorship is a means of stealing votes through limiting public discourse. Steem is committed to enabling free speech and building a free society.

The censorship only affects the steemit platform but anything created is recorded on the blockchain and freely available to read elsewhere on the internet, now having such things as busy, zapl, the information can be seen. Let's not also forget that you can see a post by simply clicking reveal comment.

So is it just censorship that Grumpy was complaining about, or was it the fact of losing payouts that he did not like?

At the same time though, we must remember that the whitepaper is not a rule book but a marketing strategy and only any rules that are made come with a hardfork update, which can only be agreed by witnesses.

In response to the cat and the puppy's requests a few comments have been going back and forth between drakos and wackou advising they would not meet grumpy's demands nor will they allow to be threatened. Here are some of the comments.

And the comments have been going back and forth, but here was some more interesting updates what happened today.

Grumpy cat posted up this post.

@Drakos on censoship. Stupidity or Disingenuity?

Note that following the comment about censorship grumpy has used bid bots to upvote the posts so that the downvotes won't affect them as much as the comments have. I should also say at this point that grumpy and madpuppy appear to be in the process of powering down. Although this has appeared to have stopped on grumpy's part anyway, it could be that he has stopped due to the recent increase in steem perhaps??

Then this morning I have noted that @haejin has downvoted a mass of madpuppy's comments also.

I have absolutely no idea why this would be the case as to my knowledge haejin does not even use bidbots, so why he felt it necessary to do these attacks now is so far

So there is the updates what is happening all the FACTS have been presented to you.

So can Grumpy Cat make such demands for his original intent for bid bots to have a 3.5 day max allowance for upvotes?

The answer is yes and no, Grumpy cat does not head up steem inc, and has no power over hardforks remember I said only the top 20 witnesses have to agree on that. Grumpy does not have any such rights or power to set such rules in place unless the majority of people agree, which it is then kind of adopted such as like many people do with plagiarism. The only way a single person can have power over this is if it is allowed to happen, if opposed and people gathered collectively then they have the ability to overcome it.

When grumpy cat made the original announcement it was welcomed because it was for the better of the platform, but when grumpy overstepped the mark by flagging minnows for using bots that they did not claim were (grumpy complaint) then people fought back.

Can I do anything if I feel it is wrong what grumpy cat is doing?

I am seeing people collectively gather together to delegate their sp to a single body, in the hopes that it will counteract the flags which are being received. But remember that with every vote SP goes down so every day grumpy can only vote so much, and people counteracting can only vote so much because the votes deplete. If you use all your vp you have to wait 5 days for replenishment thats a long time. Also be aware that doing this may set you as a target for flags off grumpy cat.

I have been flagged will Grumpy Cat flag every post I make from now on.

He could but its highly unlikely, remember even Grumpy cat only has a certain allowance per day of votes alongside mad puppy. As the platform grows and more people are coming on board it would make it harder to maintain everyone and flag them into censorship. It is more likely that they will use a lower percentage to stretch the votes more, and the more hey have to vote on people the lower that percentage will be.

Personally I don't really see the point of the flagging for the bid bots because you can also delegate to bid bots many offering a daily return in steem and sbd, so it is invetiable that in time you would receive back your delegation plus what has been lost in flagging, even if it does take a longer period of time it cannot be fully stopped. Its a senseless waste I would suggest in the white paper reading about the crab effect.

What ever the outcome it looks like this is not going to be over soon, so I hope that this post gives you a better understanding of what is going on, take caution with having this knowledge, use the platform for its intention to create great content, and meet great people.

Disclaimer This post was made, with my own observations and conversations with other members. The information I have gathered and presented in the post was from steemit itself. I would suggest to carry out your own due diligence if reading about the matter further.

Thank you for reading

xoxo

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