We ask then that the community respects the wishes of the remaining accounts using the free services and to kindly not interrupt our payment model ...
You hopefully realize that
- you are asking everyone to pay for your payment posts despite not receiving your service directly or indirectly
- you make it look as if people were doing something wrong or illegal when disagreeing with your business model and flag your posts
- you cannot stop people from disagreeing with your business model
Anyway, I appreciate you taking the steps towards a premium paid model.
With respect, over 1000 votes says that the majority of the active community has given authority to vote on these posts with a portion of their entitled votes. It is disingenuous for a minority of whales who pre-mined themselves to a position with more weight to override the wishes of these not so privileged users (who actually outweigh in terms of sheer numbers if the fair one-man-one-vote approach was used), users who wish to direct their vote to give them value on the platform in the form of a free service, maybe they don't find value in some of the other content or don't like to read and this is value for them in a different way which they would like to use their vote towards and not to have it negated and that value taken away in future because of constant downvoting from a few, especially since a downvote has more weight than an upvote.
Why the hostility?
well, with you having control over >800 posting keys, It doesn't mean that the actual owners of the account agree with what you do. They merely let you do so.
If you are referring to my account, then I need to tell you that your assumptions are incorrect. This account never mined nor witnessed a single block. All the stake in this account has been bought through BTC (arguable very early) or earned through posts (also in the early days)
Steem doesn't work that way.
Where did you get that?
All in all, I am pretty disappointed you don't even care to understand the issues people are having with your business model. I haven't yet managed to have an actual discussion here but attacks. You lay out things as facts that haven't happened. Also, it should be in your best interest to resolve conflicts and not continue with things that you have seen result in disagreements. There are many ways to actually resolve this into a win-win.
No hostility, we are just pointing out that our customers all willingly upvote our payment posts to receive the service, they are welcome to cancel their service if they choose to if they feel so strongly about the rewards model, but since the last downvote we have actually had more signups than cancellations.
We were in no way referring to your account as being pre-mined, yours was mostly grown by post rewards and BTC purchases as you say which is great. We have no issue with people earning on Steem and actually are happy when we see high paying posts because that shows the outside world the potential of Steem. Your 46K post for Piston was a historically cheered event, it was awesome and inspiring as to what would be possible and maybe why some of the other developers are here today.
We have made peace with @clayop in chat but that is the account we were referring to, in addition to the threats of calling in the Korean community to back him up, which he eventually did with the advent of @abit and @adm downvoting thereafter, that was just gang stuff, I mean why call in other people to nuke a post, that's not showing your intent is only to re-distribute rewards, there is some additional fervour there, which is the danger of flagging.
If you really think about it, there are a handful of accounts flagging, some are anonymous and the impact is only from three whales, two of which are witnesses (and I think a secondary account of one of them), if one is worried about the voice of the people the we should look to the numbers who want to vote for the service (1000+ accounts) and who haven't pulled their votes vs the 15 who want to downvote, that is true democracy taking into consideration the wishes of crowd and not 15 accounts pretending to be the crowd simply because they rally behind a few whale accounts that have a large weight of voting power from a pre-mine.
You were very diplomatic and sorted out the issue with us in chat as well and pulled your downvote, this rant was not aimed at you but rather at the situation.
We will shortly be releasing the comment attack post and you will have more insight as to why we are not very impressed with what transpired.