I have not totally figured that post out either, save that I think it was an pretty good illustration of how damaging self voting can be to the system; which may of been the point.
I can certainly see this as an effective policy depending upon how it is implemented. Do I think one account flagging can accomplish the mission if done manually? Nope.. Not a chance in hell.
People will continue to play the lotto with upvoting services as there is only so much that @grumpcat could do. If 100 users purchase votes and only 1 or 3 or 5 of those are flagged, then most users will feel as though they have a 95% chance of getting by, getting the upvote and continuing to abuse the system.
If done with a script that monitors the wallets of selected vote selling services and downvotes in response to SP transferred into those accounts then yes I could see it being effective as there would be no lotto to be played and you are guaranteed a down vote for attempting to purchase votes and not acquire them organically through good content creation.
Perhaps even have the script comment saying "You were downvote as this account is suspected of funding terrorism."
This goes back to what I have said in comments numerous times over the past few days. Why go head to head with a superior army, when you can just go after the farmers that grow the wheat to feed the army. The latter will eventually starve the vote selling services out an discourage their use. I could even see a script that randomly downvotes the followers of offending vote selling services to further motivate them out of popularity.
While some may see what @grumpycat is doing as heavy handed, its needed whereas vote selling services are not. Vote selling services are not the only way to get noticed or make any progress; tirelessly working, networking and creating quality content do the same thing, its just more work. To me it's someone finally standing up and taking an aggressive stance against the vote selling market that has established itself here.
totally makes sense to me. Vote selling is undermining the steemit idea to the max. it must be abolished.
I agree, next to go should be self exploitative self voting practices
I'm going to put that on my list of Python things to do. If I can make a working prototype, maybe there would be a few benevolent whales to fund it. I'm already working on a flag rewards project which I think you may be interested. Follow @steemflagrewards if you would like to participate. It's going to be kind of like an optional jury summons where people vote on whether a post deserved a flag and create posts which will be rewarded to the flaggers. Already making some headway pulling the data for downvoted posts in trending which is exactly what brought me here today. ;)
I like, not sure how I can help.. I"m a long way from a benevolent whale status.. lo.. but I have brains and time to contribute..
That'll help. I'll try to get the function to select 3 or random followers of @steemflagrewards for the first "jury summons" if you will.
I want to make it so there is representation from different levels of Steem Power to help prevent the process from being skewed in favor of those that hold the most power. I think this has some potential but I just need to ensure it isn't used to take sides in this pissing contest of flags that's currently going on.
Sounds good