The list of nearly 300 accounts here are on the irredeemable list, and I would call that a great use for it.
FTG spent a bunch of steem to upvote a post with a single link (or something like that), and themarkymark removed the vote. FTG wanted his money back, but whether he knew it or not, buildawhale had a no refund policy for people upvoting spam, and to prove it wasn't about the money, he sent it to null instead of refunding it. Then FTG went to commenting thousands of times per hour with multiple accounts, basically crippling people's ability to view some posts because the comment section would crash the page. That's why his accounts were put on the list.
I have no idea what joe.public did, and perhaps it deserves a fair shake in the court of public opinion, but from everything I've personally witnessed, the list has been used well. And the front-end devs (peakd, hive.blog, 3speak, esteem) seem to agree, as they are not required to use it, and can display any or all of it if they so choose.
I was in fact uninformed as to the necessity of the list when I made that comment. I have been learnin' as I go, as is my wont, and have come to agree that the list is necessary.
However, I still don't think @joe.public belonged on it, and I am happy to read just today that he no longer is. I also want to mention here that I have, as in the comment you are replying to, severely tested @themarkymark to prove he is not intent on opinion flagging.
Despite my incivility, he has not flagged me. I am presently convinced he believes, with good evidence, at least as far as I am concerned, that he is not opinion flagging, nor abuses his censorship power.
Despite these facts, this censorship power is too severe, and too seductive, to leave in the hands of one person, or even the four that seem to have been involved at one time. That is centralization of that censorship power, and is the opposite of decentralized censorship resistance, no matter the quality of the moral fiber of the individual bearing that weight alone. The moral hazard, as I mention above, is simply too onerous a burden to bear.
It was necessary that changes be undertaken, and I have briefly glanced at things today that reveal changes have been made. I still think an HPS vote is the appropriate level of control on Hive over who gets on that list, because it is essentially the end of any ability to post or comment on Hive, the equivalent of banishment, and that for stakehodlers.
Regardless of my tendency to produce these walls of text, I appreciate your informative and substantive comment, much of which I have learned is factually correct.
Thanks.
But it's not just one person involved. I can go make my own list, develop an API, and put people on there I don't like. It's up to others to either use it if they find it useful, or discard it if they see no value.
It may be one person making the list, but it's up to others running services to decide whether or not to use it, which creates accountability. As soon as it is perceived to be using for abuse, the front ends would stop using it, or maybe only grab a few names from there for their own list. It is up to the list creator to make an honest list which is valuable to the community, or else all their effort can be ignored overnight.
You are a prince among men, and I and the vast majority of ordinary meat puppets are incapable of developing an API.
While things have indeed been changed (in ways I have not yet given time to understand) if the choice is between eliminating massive onslaughts of spam and a few annoying people, or suffering that devastating spam, front ends have had little practical choice.
Might as well ask me to build a moon rocket and see the Apollo astronaut's tracks on the Moon for myself to prove the Moon landing wasn't faked.
My concern has been addressed by folks with the skills and means to address it, and other than @joe.public no longer being totally censored, I have not yet ascertained how, and whether or not what has been done exceeds my hopes, meets them, or yet leaves me concerned the community remains vulnerable to being selectively silenced without meaningful recourse. I have learned a great deal from broaching this issue with @themarkymark, and at least know now I owe him both an apology for my inaccurate statements (partly undertaken already), and thanks for enabling me to better understand, as well as doing Yoeman's duty to prevent spam from causing every user on the network to suffer.
I shall have to wrap my head around new information, and new understanding, before I can determine how to proceed. One thing I can promise is that I won't be developing an API myself, because my programming skills are limited to one course in BASIC I took in 1980 that is almost a complete blank, and formerly (prior to CSS) being able to write HTML in notepad and create websites on the fly.
I don't have the skills, and neither do most people.
Buying votes removes the proof of brain consensus. Marky was one of the few that actually cared about the quality of posts his bot voted on, and removed votes for low effort/spam posts voted by buildawhale.
I am also under no illusions that Marky is perfect, and out of the thousands of accounts blacklisted, I'm sure there were some that weren't as worthy as others. What I do know is if I were to get blacklisted, spamming obscenities and threats wouldn't be the path I would personally choose to get the matter resolved (not saying you did this, but I've seen it happen over and over). Reasonable people are more likely to be met with reason, and emotional people are more likely to be met with more emotion.
Whose steem got burned?
FTG's steem didn't get burned. He sent it for a vote, and the vote was given, then taken away because it didn't meet the standards for buildawhale. However, the voting power he paid for couldn't be magically returned, since it was used for a post, so technically it was Marky's to burn.
I will say that the ToS of buildawhale could have been better, such as making users agree to the terms before they could ever use the bot, but the fact of the matter is those were the longstanding rules of the bot, and like it or not it's how it was applied to everyone, not just FTG.