That's fair. I appreciate the objective nature of this post. Looking forward to an answer to #3. I think a lot of that could be resolved by @haejin himself by simply asking @ranchorelaxo not to upvote his posts with so much weight. He is set to make over 30k in this next week. That 's after the efforts by Bernie. Before that, it was over 40K. That's 2 million USD in a year. He claims to provide the service for free, but in fact, his double 7 figure rewards are paid by the Steem community at large.
It's wrong to silence objectors by downvotes, but it isn't wrong to offset his earnings to counteract an improper reward amount. The focus of the attack should be @ranchorelaxo. @haejin is @ranchorelaxo's beneficionary. He therefore has a great amount of influence to stop it.
But why would he? If haejin doesn't know rancho and rancho really is someone random, why would haejin just go to someone random and be like "hey, stop upvoting my posts, other people here don't like it"? And why should the focus of the attacks be rancho? If he followed all the steemit rules, why should he not be allowed to upvote whoever the hell he wishes?
Yeah, he makes a ton of money. But it's literally how steemit was built. He provides a service that other people find valuable and profits from it. I fucking hate fidget spinners, but I don't go out and try to destroy everyone selling them or the manufacturing companies making them or the people who own those companies.
If there were clear evidence that haejin and rancho were colluding and doing something harmful other than the fact that a random user has upvoted his content (haejin writes really crappy posts, plagiarizes, repeats, etc. and rancho upvotes it, or some sort of "smoking gun" correspondence between the two), then the downvotes/flagging would make more sense. But right now the only reason people are flagging is because 1. haejin makes a lot of profit and brings a lot of new users to this platform 2. someone who has a lot of money likes what haejin says
Haejin made a lot of profits and money from this site way before rancho started upvoting his content. Nobody ever said anything about it.
The system was designed with the flagging mechanism for this specific reason. If people don't agree with the rewards, they should downvote because the reward pool belongs to them too. This is covered in the section in the whitepaper about the crab bucket.
It would be different if the funds in question were rancho's own. They are not. He is upvoting in a way that many users disagree with, at their expense. That's why his upvotes should be corrected by those users.