Hello @datapotomus, sorry to hear about your cat, I have one also.
Moving to the subject of the post, I think you are skipping my parts of my post to dilute the evidence, high lighting only small parts without continuing with the other proof. I don't know if you are doing it on purpose or not. So let's see why you're points don't add up :
1.Taking to long to remove abusers - section from your post
You only mentioned one thing, the one with the lesser damage, skipping the other serious abuse and the most rewarded one of droucil, which got a lot of votes from him and his alt accounts and made a ton of money from getting the votes from the bot. It took him one month to blacklist this one, even tough many people reported it. You skipped blacklisting circlejerkers, even tough the rule was in place after dMania bot V3 and evidence was sent. For detailed specifics you can read it in the post here
Besides the other things that don't add up to your point, we need to see the most important stuff :
People sent him this informations for free, they spent the time looking for the abusers and wasted their energies. Why didn't he detected it himself to protect his platform? With such a huge delegation he could have done that or put other people in place to prevent and fight abuse. I don't think he wasn't expecting that abuse won't happen.
2.The search for proof - section from your post
Don't know what confirmation biased means, but will look later. To me, it just looks like a contradictory thing to say. Don't think I need to explain this further, we are all grown people here, we are not in kindergarten anymore.
3.Viewpoint of abuse - section from your post
First this is the link to : dMania bot v3 upgrade
In this place you've put the top delegators accounts that weren't active in posting or voting in dMania, except zombee. This users probably delegated because they believed in the project, like I did and make some returns on their delegation. Also probably they didn't have the time to post here to much or to vote on other memes and gifs. The most important thing is that, even if they could abuse the platform with their delegated power, they choose not to do it, because they have good ethics.
I won't take them one by one, but if you looks closely in their profiles at upvotes or posts, you will soon realize that they don't post to much and neither vote to much. For finding this out :
go to posts on their profile and see the dates when they posted
go to upvotes for each profile and click on the posts that they upvoted to see the dates
The most active powerfull supporters, that were active daily where : zombee on the first delegator page and the ones on the second page, where I was also.
So your point doesn't make to much sense.
Don't forget here also that there where many circlejerkers after this update that didn't got blacklisted, even tough there was a clear rule against it.
4.Multiple Accounts and abuse - section from your post
I think you missed use steemworld, I ran a check on steemdb and there are different results than yours. I have left a link for every single one to confirm the source of the images :
https://steemdb.com/@sinsister/data
As you can see there are 53.612 SBD and 40.129 STEEM in rewards, not 44.03 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries
https://steemdb.com/@coindeluxe/data
As you can see there are 52.286 SBD and 21.053 STEEM in rewards, not 42.10 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.
https://steemdb.com/@puppet-master/data
As you can see there are 50.510 SBD and 20.627 STEEM in rewards, not 41.25 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.
https://steemdb.com/@terimar/data
0 for terimar because he was stopped by the message sent to him, to warn him about the fact that we suspected that he created multiple accounts. Didn't had the link to account garanger then, but it was obvious because he was upvoting with 100% and with less other accounts.
https://steemdb.com/@ready-player-one/data
As you can see there are 11.738 SBD and 5.714 STEEM in rewards, not 11.42 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.
https://steemdb.com/@tank-girl/data
As you can see there are 10.628 SBD and 5.173 STEEM in rewards, not 10.35 STEEM as shown in steemworld for this account. Probably used beneficiaries.
Here you made a typo, you've put account @granger, don't know if you made it on purpose or not, but the correct account is @garanger
Either way this account was not used for rewards, just to create the other ones.
You also forgot to mention account @meme-maniac, which belongs to him also and got rewards in the past. It's in the post also :
www.steemit.com/@meme-maniac, scroll through the post to see the rewards, for some reason they don't show up. Probably used his account as a beneficiary directly as he created, as shown this account, through his main account.
The account @garanger was used for testing most of the times as you can check his posts, that doesn't mean those other 7 account where used for testing, because there's no proof there, quite the contrary.
Let's not forget about the fact that he was stopped from using this accounts, because of the message that was sent to him by more users, where we suspected that those accounts belonged to him, but didn't had the direct connection with account @garanger at that point. If he wasn't sent that message, would he had continue to make rewards ? What do you think?
As you can see there are more rewards involved that you have mentioned. I didn't understand it also, why put the project in danger for some rewards, but with all the points presented it made sense in the end. So this point of yours about the rewards is automatically invalided by the presented facts.
The mining script - section from your article
That is just my opinion and I could be wrong, like I mentioned in the post. I just wanted to let people know in order to investigate further, because based on the other proof that I showed in other cases, it can be a posibility that he did this also. So I'm not accusing him of this problem at this point regarding this matter.
Conclusion : This should clear everything up and I hope he will make the right decisions from now on. Being so inactive in discord and not hearing people opinions didn't help either. Censoring them made it worse. I hope he made the discord link available again (because it was on expire) and takes the right decisions from now on. Cheers !
I did skip large pieces of your post as 80% of it was your views and confirmation bias. I also refrenced your post multiple times. At the very beginning I suggested that people read it. I can’t provide a different viewpoint for the way that you feel or the way that things “probably” went down. My point was not to argue that you were wrong my point was to show that we can all see the same data and come to different conclusions based on the way we gather data, and what lense we are looking through when gathering data.
You are right about the rewards in the fact that I thought steemworld still took curation into account. Steemworld only shows what the author specifically got paid. I will modify my one line to remove the “take 25% away for curation.
Even using your math for the decrepencies in the account, the platform brings in orders of maginute more money than the accounts that were used.
You could be right and even though the platform brings in more money @zombee wanted even more. I just don’t view it the same way, because strategically to me it doesn’t add up. There was way more to loose than there was to gain.
If you think my analysis is invalid that’s completely fine. This post was not designed to change your mind. It was made to show that based on my personal analysis I didn’t come to the same conclusion based on what you presented plus the the independent research I performed.
Yeah I couldn't understand that either, until I looked back and on the other things that he did. I understand where you are coming from tough. I wanted the platform to succeed because it was very well designed and could attract a lot of users. Also tried to help by making contests, reporting abusers, curating and by proposing new stuff. So nothing more I can say. I was very disapointed for wasting my time and energy, while he was doing this things.
Everyone can decide by themselves, that's what I thought about your analysis and had to express my point of view.
Nothing more I can say, I wish you good luck further and it was nice having a normal discussion with you, even tough we have different points of view. That doesn't happen to often and I am glad when it happens.
I'm still trying to understand how one can be "even handed" about this situation?
It is clear as day what was going on, and thank goodness someone was willing to call out the scammers. Why are people allowed to make multiple bot accounts and also allowed to be in charge of creating and running the algorithms on top of that.... It is fraudulent, a serious abuse of power and a massive conflict of interest if i ever heard one.
There is really nothing to defend, imo. The evidence was overwhelming. In fact, I already was a bit jaded, but @equ1l1br1um's hard work and the compiled evidence just proved to me what I already knew... that if given the power, and while they think no one else is watching, eventually the results will always be the same.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." ~ Lord Acton
source
Welp it looks like either the discord channel has been shut down, or I have been banned as well.
I think it was shutdown after zombee's post. He announced that in a post earlier.
discord channel was dead for months