@stevevc You should not offer support to this initiative in my opinion. Re-read the whitepaper. This type of authoritarian attitude is exactly the type of thing that steemit was created to fight against.

Look at what a hypocritical piece of crap you're lending your support to.
There is not a single account he's flagged that's "smeared the good name" of steemit.

I've never paid for an upvote on one of my postings, but I did make a post explaining how one can profit from lending their support to one. This mental masturbator with delusions of grandeur flagged me because someone else upvoted one of my comments to a whole $0.60 using a bid bot. I'm single, I work at a restaurant, every penny counts and while I guess no one owes me anything, I still don't appreciate people stealing from my tip jar.

@church-of-piglet proceeded to flag me when I confronted him about it to explain how violated he made me feel when he did that. Do you really not see that this @church-of-piglet account uses exactly the same words as and follows exactly the same arbitrary abusive flagging pattern used by @earnest and @feminism back in the early days and I'd hazard a guess it's probably the same douchebag.

I had an account back in those days and gave it up. Because even though I had very little activity, creeps like this crawl out of the woodwork and attack anything they feel is threat to their manhood. It is accounts like @church-of-piglet that are actually the cause of your attrition problem via their abusive flagging.

As for the original upvote. The person who upvoted me felt it was a worthwhile expenditure of his funds. He could have just as easily sent a tip, but he didn't. He's a creator adding value to the platform. Unlike the jerks claiming they are helping to redistribute the reward pool yet are doing nothing of the sort. All they really are doing is trying to passively benefit while contributing absolutely nothing of value and frustrating people who are actually contributing. For accounts like @church-of-piglet the more people they frustrate and drive off, the more money that is available for them.

They know they don't really have the power to attack any but the smallest and weakest. They should be focusing their efforts on the $500 and $700 posts, but they don't waste their power for that because abusing someone smaller and weaker gives them a special thrill. As is the norm for any rapist or sociopath.

The bots are just a symptom of an unbalanced economy. If you want the bid bots to go away then change the reward system. Get rid of delegation and/or force curation rewards to 100% SP only. The bidbots will be unable to pay their delegators or simply won't have any. That will probably drive off the biggest investors in droves though.

Do you really want to pick the fight you're trying to pick? The thing you guys are forgetting is, people paid for their their stake. They want to profit from it and they have a right to profit using the methods available to them. Are you really telling those of us interested in investing whether it be time, effort or money that we aren't welcome to profit using the tools provided by the platform?

Go ahead, try to nullify the voice of the tens of thousands of investors who have decided to profit here in whatever ways are available to us. You'll lose us and we'll move our energies and our resources to something else.

Take a look at the things I'm doing for instance. I've invested hundreds of hours building things for steemit. I did this because the abusive flagging looked like it went away for awhile, so it felt safe to make a new account and come show you all what I can do.

Do you really want @earnest 2.0 here to drive people like me away again?

You can't have it both ways. Either you support investors and creators, or you support these abusive types that fail to recognize that an upvote is an upvote whether it's paid for or whether it's because the right whale takes notice of your hardwork. An upvote is an expression of the will of a person who invested in this platform and who has the right to vote for who they want.