RE: "Better the Devils you know, than the Devil you don't" ... Migrating to a new blockchain
As I disclaimed in the article:
... And lastly, there was nothing especially egregious about @ats-david’s post which was the inspiration for this article. His post was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and hence became a representative example of a larger phenomenon.
My post WAS NOT designed to be a criticism of you personally (or anyone, personally, for that matter) but rather to elucidate a recent phenomenon I've observed amongst Whales, Witnesses and Dev's ... hypocrisy. An attempt to assume a 'moral mantle' of leadership despite years spent as exemplars of 'moral turpitude.'
As I mentioned in my article:
Followers of this blog will be well-acquainted with my years-long harangue against the flagrant cheating and miscreant skullduggery that reduced STEEM/Steemit to little more than a den of thieves. Bidbots, circle jerks, multiple account self-upvoting, spam, abusive downvoting by Whales, etc., etc.
That was not an exaggeration. In terms of pure wordcount there are few Steemians who could equal my own. Posts, comments and replies. Poetry and prose, seriously and satirically. I tried it all. To no avail. From time to time, my criticism drew the attention, and ire, of a number of Witnesses and, at times, you were amongst them.
To wit (scroll about 70% down the comments section for a lengthy exchange between you an I):
Admittedly, it's all I can do not to publish a post entitled, "Whales, Witnesses and Dev's... I Told You So." Almost everything I predicted would occur, absent reform, has now happened. And my 'Proposed Reforms' of which you were so dismissive ... almost all have been adopted by Voice.
Quill
I stand by everything written in those comments back then. What you want this blockchain to be and what it is are completely different. You won’t find many investors around here that want a Voice-like platform.
I’m not even sure how you can have or want a platform like Voice and also champion things like decentralization, free-speech, and free association, which are pretty much the underpinnings of social media on a blockchain. Voice offers nothing that Facebook can’t already do...except maybe give you tokens, but even they’ll likely have that soon enough - and with Voice, you get to dox yourself so that anything said can be traced back to your physical self. I’m sure I don’t need to point out how that can affect free-speech in the face of government suppression.
I think what you also missed is that I have been criticizing the leadership on this platform for pretty much the bulk of my 3.5 years here. And that criticism includes bots, witnesses, Steemit Inc., and even large stakeholders. But there’s a difference between informed opinions based on the comprehension of blockchain protocols and their intent and a wish list of things that you would like to forbid because you just don’t like them.
I understand that you were fairly new back then and I suppose that it can be an excuse for not understanding things, but then it doesn’t make much sense to try to propose sweeping “reforms” that can’t practically be applied without fundamentally altering the purpose of the blockchain in the first place. Ignorance can be easily forgiven. Arrogance...not so much.
This is a perfect example of both ignorance and arrogance. It would have been much better if you acknowledged how many people and how much criticism has been levied against the very people and actions that you’ve mentioned, including from myself, over the span of four years.
“Whales, witnesses, and devs” are not a monolithic cabal, neither as a whole nor in their respective groups. It would do a lot of people a lot of good if they truly accepted and understood this fact.