We recently ran some statistics and found that @ozchartart was the number one blogger by author rewards in the past month. Every single day he posts 3 or 4 times and every single time he posted he would get $70 to $120 per post totaling over $300 per day. This is far more than any other blogger.
What is more, I have reason to believe that @ozchartart is a friend of some of the major whales who up vote his posts. What is telling is that it isn't @ozchartart who is acting out by flagging every single one of my comments into oblivion, it is the whale(s) that vote for him.
Content Quality and Value
This is a very subjective issue when voting on an individual post. When in doubt I tend to let things slide because I recognize that other people may value things differently than me. Every unique post deserves some time in the sun.
The problem I have with @ozchartart is that he has been producing the same content for almost 6 months and prior to my flagging attempts was pulling in more money each month than anyone else. I ignored his posts because they had the "appearance of substance" due to length, images, etc. I also figured there was some good trading discussion stimulated by it.
A closer look at Content
After a while I grew tired of scrolling past his posts multiple times per day every day. He was dominating the trending page. So I decided to dig deeper. What I discovered is that 95% of every post could be completely automated. The 5% that couldn't be automated involved one paragraph describing a chart and drawing a few unlabeled lines. As a programmer I also know that much the remaining 5% were text descriptions were formulaic, meaning that a computer could generate the text and simply substitute in different numbers on different days. Even the charts could be automatically annotated by software simply by looking at the data. All told, it would be a trivial computer science project to replace 99% of the content.
Relative Value to Other Content
In my humble opinion, almost every single post and comment on the site represented more real value than @ozchartart was providing. A down vote on this content is just a shortcut for up voting everything else. In terms of time, energy, and proof-of-engagement every comment longer than a few sentences is of higher value.
Double Standards
Some whales have frequently flagged high profile bloggers such as myself, @dollarvigilante and even @krnel. The justification for their flags were that "they posted too much and got too many votes". It is clear that they feel justified in periodically voting against these legitimate posts containing much more involved content.
My response to such criticism was to decline payout on the majority of my posts. I respectfully request that @ozchartart do the same.
Coordinated Campaign of Sock Puppets
Many people may not realize it, but one of the whales supporting @ozchartart, is and has been troll from the very beginning. He is prone to outbursts and rage flagging legitimate content. Many have witnessed his childish antics in slack and other places.
I have been tolerating his behavior because he is a whale. In my opinion he has proven himself to be a bad whale. A whale who profiting by promoting @ozchartart and who is selling out.
Propose a Truce
I will no longer flag @ozchartart if other whales stop up voting for him. I think we are civilized enough to agree to disagree on this particular issue.
Censorship!!
The trolls and spammers are always the first to cry censorship. They will say outrageous things in order to defend their gravy train. I have no problem with his "content" and would never dream of flagging it if it declined rewards. What we have here is a legitimate difference of opinion between two whales.
When we both express our contrary opinions on a particular piece of content things are fair. What is not acceptable is to take this disagreement outside the voting booth and start throwing a tantrum by flagging my comments that weren't even getting any meaningful payout. Whether you believe @ozchartart adds or removes value, it is clear that burying my actual comments is abusive and taking value away from the platform.
Conclusion
Steem is a platform where everyone gets to vote their stake. We know that there are people who will attempt to gain every advantage if it profits them, even at the expense of the whole. They will claim that I am the one attempting to game the rules to secure an even larger stake for me and my friends, but this is mere projection. I created Steem to give it away. I designed a system to intentionally include as many people as possible. I have no need for more stake and am actively giving away much of the STEEM I do have to fund development and free account signups.
Lets not make this about any individual post. Lets look at the past 6 months of unchallenged milking of the platform. Leaving these actions unchallenged will only make the abusers stronger.
Hopefully we can move on to more productive activity.
