Yup, this has been going on for a long period of time, and it's insane. I have one question though, what is the real difference here between all of this and the haejin-situation?
I mean, people tried to counter haejin in the past, and they failed. Nowadays, he still publish a ton of posts, have zero engagement and get 100% upvotes from rancho and obviously upvotes his own posts too.
And yeah, he is powering down as well.
The short answer is not much really, if those rewards from the accounts in the pie are going round to where the votes came from.
Nothing, which is why he got a bit of a mention too. TA.
I'm glad, otherwise I would've missed something. :D
But yeah, I actually think that these types of problems starts with the whole "do what you want with your stake"-thing. Self Voting is okay and as you're also allowed to do whatever you want with your stake... Things are getting tricky.
Especially as we've seen investors posting crap only to reward themselves, without major repercussions or consequences before as well. This is also one of the reasons I avoid flagging to begin with, because it doesn't feel good to go after a few when there are others doing the exact same thing.
On the other hand, you'll have to start somewhere.
has to be that way. The problem was their was incentive in one direction, cost in the other. That is changing.
Trending was a good place to start as it was visible as an indicator of downvote value. It isn't the place to stay though because hopefully in time what is in trending deserves to be there.