What is more, I have reason to believe that @ozchartart is a friend of some of the major whales who up vote his posts. What is telling is that it isn't @ozchartart who is acting out by flagging every single one of my comments into oblivion, it is the whale(s) that vote for him.
I thought that this was a social networking platform. The last I checked, friendships are a part of the social nature of humans.
Yes, it is good to be friends and to share. But part of being social is supporting the entire community not just your buddies. Whales have greater responsibilities in this regard than other individuals because their actions carry so much weight.
Are you saying the whales in question haven't done anything for the rest of the community? Just for their friends? Have you heard of Project Curie?
I don't know any of them personally yet they have supported my mediocre posts cause they are aware of my work outside of the platform to bring users here.
I can't remember a single vote from you in the 8 months I've been here though.
And it's impossible to do both?
Welcome back!
And then you have people like @thisisbenbrick who will flag any content against the whales just so he can get more votes from them. The worst kind of users
If I could upvote my friends to the trending page on a daily basis at the expense of the other users experience this would be an anti social behaviour. There is nothing "social" about nepotism. It's pretty harmless for the minnows and even the dolphins, but you're in a position of responsibility if you have enough SP to have a powerful influence on general user experience.
I vote for people I know and don't know all the time.
If you can't vote for what you want, then there is no incentive for anyone to buy steem, power up, gain influence, and reward the content you like.
It's not that you can't it's that your stake can be countered and your vote causes conflicts within the community when you're unrealistic about the value of your friends posts.
You're not looking at the bigger picture. If you're not voting in a manner than makes the platform attractive to the outside world then you are causing damage to your own investment by voting in your self interest (which in the long run is not in your interest). Nepotism within any community is unattractive.
And the last reason to invest would be to protect an investment we have not yet made so the argument that anti social voting behaviours increases demand is just ludicrous.
Correct. Which is why we will need to change Steem drastically. Not to remove this factor entirely or to make it a utopic socialist wet dream or anything, but there are problems with this and they are right here in this posts comment section.
(Not refering to anyone in particular, but to the behaviour that said system tends to feed)