OK, That's progress. Taking the bot out of the bidbot still looks sketch AF. If your goal is to promote good content, why the membership fees? What are your criteria for "top-notch content?" I support a few different curation projects, and none of them charge a fee. They ask for HP delegations, and share the rewards with their supporters. Y'know, like a community.
Observe the difference on our conduct. I state my position and can support it with a line of reasoning. I offer constructive criticism of your comments. You respond not by attacking arguments or reasoning, but by calling people bullies and attacking the people making the argument.
While I disagree with self-voting, a minnow responding to malicious downvote campaigns and actual bullying from those they critique by self-voting is entirely understandable. And based on the backlash their criticism generated, anonymity is completely justified. Focus on the arguments and evidence, not the personality.
You might not be bullying him, and if you're not, he's not talking about you.
But please understand that many are not being as rational as you are.
My position is that I haven't been following this closely, but I know very few people who love hive as much as Troy or who have onboarded as many people to hive as Troy has. He's manning booths, and proclaiming his love for the platform nonstop. He has a big heart, and I love the dude.
I hope that anyone who has issues with vote buying can start with the sbi program instead of dogging the little guy.
It doesn't take long to find many, many large services on hive that offer straight vote buying.
You seem very reasonable though, and I appreciate that. Please keep an open mind that not everyone Troy is talking to daily is reasonable.
Hive SBI is an account-based curation program with a deep history. It only looks like vote buying if you give a very cursory look.
Yes, the program's curation income is paid back to the accounts that sponsor others, in the form of upvotes on their own content, but that means half of the value goes to accounts that paid nothing (were curated for upvotes by others!) and the majority of members have never paid anything at all for votes.
I appreciate the clarification, and I hope that you continue to communicate with Troy and us diplomatically to ensure we understand your concerns, so that we can change or clarify something we communicated poorly. You seem very reasonable, and I appreciate and honor that.
I hope you can appreciate that Troy does truly love the Hive community, and he works his ass off for it both online and in person at events. He's one of the most authentic and passionate people I've encountered in the community. I absolutely love the dude, and I hope you take a look at the full body of his contributions to Hive. You might just fall in love with the dude too.
No, he made a very direct accusation against me. I'm not convinced about SBI. Someone sent me some shares ages ago. I haven't participated otherwise. But from what I can tell, it's not so much vote buying as account curation with a reward structure in addition to support for other users. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I'll remain neutral for now. In any case, "But someone else is doing the bad thing" is never justification for doing the bad thing yourself, is it?