I don't have as much of a problem with self-upvoting (and circle-jerking, the light version of self-upvoting). It's true, how else is somebody who invested 5 grand supposed to get anywhere here? I've tried, with great content (and contribution) for 2 years without a break, and it hasn't happened. I even have a wife and some models helping me produce content and make posts/comments. But we're still barely able to scrape together $0.02 (payout cutoff) without help from other curators, which is hard to come by without paying for it. I don't buy votes, but I occasionally self-upvote or have my team group vote on something so it manages to pay out. I wouldn't attack somebody on the sole basis that they're self-voting. Self-voting garbage (even posting garbage) is shitty and should be discouraged. But self-voting itself isn't a crime. It's not even against the rules, and is in fact encouraged by the blockchain settings, intentionally.
From my perspective, this might have been a sword you didn't need to fall on.
That said, maybe he's a spammer, and needs to be attacked for that. But we can't attack people for self-voting, and we can't even attack them for acting entitled to profit from their investment here. If we continuously discourage and drive off all the investors, the price will never recover.
His retaliation downvotes are lame indeed, but I can probably empathize with where he's coming from emotionally.
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Self-upvoting isn't really the issue. I still do it, even though I am phasing it out.
But HE does it with an account with roughly an $8.50 upvote AND a couple of other alts that have $2-3 upvotes. If you combine that with a whole cadre of orcas with $2-4 upvotes, it's pretty easy for him to dig into trending like a tick with little to no effort. Once he gets on to trending, he gives practically zero engagement. As a matter of fact, I've seen him skip over customers/upvoters trying to engage with him to downvote his critics. That's if he even bothers to check, as he's just pushing his steem posts via steempress.
I don't know if I would call it spam, but the majority of it is not worthy of the rewards they are getting compared to the anyone else here. He is well aware that is the argument against him. If he want's to emotionally revenge downvote unrelated posts, he can, but as you can see the community at large is growing pretty tired of the bullying.
And the rewards come out of a pool by the way, the more leaches you have attached to it, the less there is left for people putting in the actual work.
Ahhhh, okay.
But are we pushing away people with money? $8 to you might be a lot, but maybe to others who have more money, that's not very much. Maybe to you that feels like "too much", but to him it feels like "too little"? Maybe to somebody with even less than you, your 25 cent self upvotes are MASSIVE abuse, but to you, that's almost nothing and you see no problem with it?
Just saying, perspective.
And we really do appear to be driving away anyone holding/buying STEEM, which is already incredibly hard to do as the price loses 10% every month for 2 years straight. The price will continue to fall as we drive away investors (people with money).
I'm saying on the aggregate he produces consistent $50-60 posts at least once per day, and sometimes two or more in a day. He is turning right around and dumping those rewards.