@ats-david, one thing (to play devil's advocate for a second) that stands out to me as a possible shred of evidence to show that @honeyscribe, etc. are NOT written by @kushed, but are indeed separate individuals from another account, is the complete difference in writing by each author on the https://steemd.com/trending/abuse thread.
If you look at @kushed's long, drawn out defense, it is riddled with poor syntax, horrible grammar, incomplete logic, and weak rebuttals. The writing is hard to follow, disorganized, emotional and reactionary, difficult to trust, and generally headache inducing.
@honeyscribe's response, on the other hand, is well written. It's organized and thoughtful, has better syntax and paragraph structure, follows a flow of thought that is easy to follow, models after the kind of style experienced bloggers use (with headlines, short paragraphs, concise points, etc.) and altogether seems quite sincere.
If I were jumping on THAT discussion without much information, I'd say the account was a friend or a relative. She writes like a woman, uses a lot of emotion and thought-process words that women writers use more often then men.
She could just be some gal he knew and had her write this. But they are completely different writers at least in this rebuttal. I'm just saying.
But even if that were the case, and she's a real person, the puppetry and the gaming of these particular accounts is absolutely undeniable. And this discussion is a very interesting one and deserves attention.
The question is, if this person is real, and she wanted to start an account, and she knew @kushed, and @kushed knew he was a crappy writer, and he wished he could write material like this woman, what's wrong with creating a symbiotic relationship with her? She writes, he curates, he gives her an anonymous voice where she can speak about things that she could not otherwise do in her regular career, they both get paid....is that so bad?
Again, totally playing devil's advocate here. What if she's real, and @kushed is just managing the accounts? Then what? Does that change things?
What if, hypothetically speaking, you or I were that person? @kushed bumped into us at the water cooler, said, "My writing sucks. Yours is great." and then we said, "My writing is great. My curation is nonexistent."
And we combined efforts. Our writing, for his curation.
And WE were the one who got paid?
Would we personally feel like we were gaming the system? I think it's a worthy question.
I think you're misunderstanding the post. I'm not claiming that @kushed wrote any of these posts. The purpose of this was to highlight the fact that these two accounts are being operated by the same person, but pretending to be two different people. They were deceiving readers/curators and being upvoted by the same whales. The data that I presented here was in fact accurate - as both @honeyscribe and @kushed admitted.
Now, the problem isn't that this user is anonymous. I couldn't care less about anonymity. The problem was the deciet and the collusive voting. @kushed knew that these accounts were the same person posting essentially the same type of posts every day, but he (and his friends) were upvoting these posts - knowing that they were the same person. Once it was publicly exposed that these two accounts were the same person and were taking in rewards from the same whales every day, they finally admitted it.
However, they're now claiming that it was a safety issue and that her identity is at risk because of what I did - which is preposterous. There is not one shred of her personal information presented here. The only information that I have about her was information publicly provided by @kushed in RocketChat about her being a professional blogger. There was no "safety" risk from either myself or @bacchist. In fact, the person who informed us about her non-Steemit identity and was questioning her about her identity, and then passing that information along to us, is one of the people commenting on her post in support of her.
I never insisted on verification because it was never the issue at hand. I was looking at links between the multiple sock accounts and the whales upvoting them. They are numerous. This was only one piece of the puzzle. In the coming days, you'll get a more complete picture about who these socks are...and about previous socks that people identified several weeks back. I'm confident that the data collected will paint a pretty clear picture of the culprits, including the ones mentioned in this post and who are now claiming innocence. This was never just about @honeyscribe, @perspective, and @kushed - but they are certainly involved in the deceit and collusion, admittedly.
Got it--the collusive bit I mean. Especially with a duplicative account (@perspective). However, I believe the anonymous claims are real. There was no safety risk with you or @bacchist, but having experienced the paranoia myself of having been stalked and harassed by someone who knows how to infiltrate fine-tuned systems and accounts, I think she had every right to feel concerned about @reneenouveau's knowledge of her and the potential of danger there, even if there was none.
She doesn't know you. That part seems authentic to me. I KNOW most of the puppet accounts have kind of a "dramatic effect" to them. But I think this part of it is real.
I think it was gamed. I think it was collusive. I think it's a raw deal that they came up with @perspective on top of everything else and had them interact with one another. But....I don't know.
I look forward to seeing what else you've got. This is the most excitement I've had on here in awhile!
I really look forward to seeing what else you've got.