You do understand that the proxy voting between rancho and haejin are the exact types of posts they are talking about, right? Do you understand how it is bad for the community and the community members? You can expect those whales to reverse every $300+ vote rancho gives, as they should. It is basically self-voting. It may be different if haejin didn't post 7-9 times a day, but since he does, it will be taking massive amounts of funds from the rewards pool ~700k. That might not seem like your problem, and that's fine, but many of the whales and minnows alike have a real interest in protecting our investment, which would decline rapidly if there is mass gaming of the system the way rancho and haejin are doing. There are a lot of diverse content providers on here, and they have a responsibility to voice their say in the amount of rewards posts get. They do this through upvotes, downvotes, non-votes and commenting.

Now, should they vote haejin's post to 0 like they were? No. They should not. However, it is well within their right to bring it to a comparable level of similar post types.

Some of you have asked me, in conversations, about the reward pool and the way it works. I am not an expert, but this is an analogy I came up with to describe it:

So if he leaves alot will leave... then the reward pool gets smaller.

Well, no. It would get bigger. It would actually stay the same, but everybody's piece would get bigger. So, for example, the reward pool is 695,419 Haejin is taking 1% of that, he leaves 99% of that for the rest of the communtiy. Doesn't seem that bad, right? Well, there are currently 351,489,308,504,710,000 (that's 351 quadrillion) claims on the reward pool. So a 1% pull from a single user is tremendous.

The way I see it, hes not TAKING MONEY AWAY... hes brining new money in. Right?

No. The reward pool stays the same whether he is here or not. We could argue that the more users on Steemit the more Steemit will rise in value, but it could also be argued that if Steemit is seen as an unfair place it could cause Steem's value to lower.

SO, if I dont upvote haejin and I read his analysis... then I leave the site and go back to trading... who benefits?
No one got my upvote... meaning i didnt participate in the reward pool.

Everyone on Steemit has an opportunity and a responsibility to direct the reward pool funds. You can do this by upvoting, downvoting, or abstaininig. Picture it this way. Your mom gives you and two of your friends the ability to spend 12 bucks at a casino. And tells you to decide where to spend it. She didn't give you each 4 bucks, she just gave you the ability to choose how it's spent. So each of you have equal say over 4 bucks. Friend 1 says put .25 here, friend 2 say put .85 here. You decide you don't want to put the effort into figuring out which game would be best and say you'd rather just go to the pool. Now your friends have control over 6 bucks each.

That 12 bucks is the reward pool and haejin represents a single group of games in a casino with 351 quadrillion games. In terms of overall benefit of steemit, many of your friends don't think putting so much of our funds into a single game is a good idea. It becomes even more of an issue when when a single friend with considerable influence continues to pump funds into that game regardless of value lost by everyone else.