I would agree, I did leave a comment message on @upme alerting them and asking them to add him to the blacklist, I also hit up @minnowbooster and steemcleaners on discord, as well as messaged all his delegates..Doing everything I can to attack the problem... I will do an update post on the effect we have had on past winners..
Also you have to look at the financial incentive for the vote sellers and gauge their motivation to change as he is spending a lot of SP to promote his TA..
I think the vote selling is shortsighted, but convincing people of that may take a while. Selling voting power means that the purchaser has the control but not the consequences. The seller is subject to the vesting schedule and can't dump instantly, but the buyer has no incentive not to harvest short term gains that wreck the value long term.
It's like renting a fast car out to a teenager with no collateral or insurance.
I agree and likewise believe that vote selling is extraordinarily short sighted and in the long run only serves to damage the platform. Moreover it is not really a viable path towards success, in the end the % gains are minimal for the purchaser and its more fallacy than reality.
Granted there is a point at which the ends do justify the means in regards to gaining small percentage points, as profitability of a % is based upon capital invested so if your spending 100SBD to make 105 over and over, then it could be viewed as a profitable venture regardless of the fact that it hurts the long term health of the platform. Also at that level it becomes considerably more difficult to combat and the shrinkage of the pool when say hundreds of members get to that level could be quite substantial.
Hell even some of these low level shit heads I go after have skimmed 5k or more during their run. My goal is to catch them toward the beginning and keep crushing them down and prevent them from growing into something more sinister. My ability to do so will increase as my SP increases and I have ever more influence to enforce community friendly behavior and dissuade these startups before they become and enterprise.
Now is a somewhat critical time as the site is not entirely fucked yet, but with each passing day and each new shit head.. it gets more and more difficult to combat. Now is the time to take a hard right, fork the site or pursue some other radical venture that will eliminate the issue in its entirety.
In all honest I just want the site to get back on track and get back to the point were its purist ideals are in full force. Those being that the best content is promoted based upon its merit. That is what will keep the site interesting help it grown and increase steem power dramatically.
I think the devs are trying to open a lot of different avenues, Dtube, the streaming thing etc. but have yet to address simple problems affecting the parent site, problems that will only migrate and infect other platforms built in the same fashion. They cannot expect to create something better until the figure out how to fix the prototype and make it function as designed first.