It wasn't killed. It is still there. He is VERY active. He has many accounts and moves a lot of power between many of them. I do think it is good that he doesn't SEEM to be flagging people for simple disagreement anymore, though he has so many accounts I don't know if that is the case.
I am pretty sure randowhale is him. He is also engagement, thecyclist, and several others. So it was not KILLED. You can't kill anything here. He has moved power around on his own.
His posting power is killed - his posts don't show up. But his voting power is still intact - that doesn't change.
Oh I see... Dang I didn't realize his reputation was -10. I guess things caught up to him finally. He just moved his power to his other accounts.
@dan killed his account because of downvote abuse.
That was the @dantheman account and it didn't kill it at all. He stopped using them after he resigned from his position.
I said @dan killed bernies account.
Oh I didn't know he killed it. How recently was that?
See his post https://steemit.com/steemit/@berniesanders/6g6eag-berniesanders-signing-off
He also didn't abuse it. He actually down voted the whales like bernie that had been down voting people and suddenly they didn't like it. Oh actually it was OZTchart and the other whales that down vote attacked... but that is of an example of why I said flagging and going negative against those who flag and go negative doesn't work out well.
then flagging him is even worse, imo.
Maybe he learned the lesson and you are right that it was OK to go to war - Im no pacifist btw.
My questions are rather meant to provoke thinking about actions then that I really want to blame someone for murder.
Sometimes it is good that things die.
He didn't learn his lesson, just check all his comments in the last days - including comments to my latest post that he downvoted.
it's 2am and I already got a headache. If I forgot remind me to look into it, maybe I can be a neutral 3rd party ;). But no promises I already failed when it came to Steemtrail.
I know that the person behind the account is not dead and that he is also not away from Steemit. I never encountered his other accounts though.
I dislike his approach and his flagging for disagreeing or thinking people don't deserve their payout. Manly I don't like the cursing and camp-thinking he promotes.
However, I think he came from an honest place and downvoting the account he down voted from is eye-for-an-eye policy I do not really like. Maybe I should have got more involved in the last big dispute (Steemtrail vs Sanders). I felt incompetent though.
Not matter how much I like to say "I was busy looking for a job", it was also his arguments and even more the reaction to those arguments that made me abandon my @politics-trail account.
I will resume at least some work within trails soon (if they let me after all the inactivity), mainly because you have to try to change things in a civil way from within, namely talking in a friendly manner with our leaders, Rick and Joe, about the problem.
Maybe as a specific note on @politics-trail. Looking around the politics tag I saw many established authors similar to you, who have a decent following, reputation and solid (topic-based and well written) articles.
At some point I felt that I might not be the right person to create a politics-community, mainly because there already is one!
That said there are still tons of undervalued in #politics that I would love to promote in one way or the other.
I was supporting the trails and allowing them to use my account for some voting via streemian. After HF19 that was leading to a lot of problems with being able to vote as they were voting some decent sized votes with my account.
I then watched and they were always voting trail posts. Those posts were making a ton, but the people the posts were highlighting were not. So my reward pool was draining too fast, and they were not actually doing much to really support those posts that were in their overviews.
Overviews can make a lot of money here if done well, without needing a streemian. It is not really my thing to do overviews. I did think of it briefly when I started here, but decided "nah not really my thing", and then soon someone like Gavvett was doing it and he made a fortune doing it.
I'm okay with that. If I was in it for the money I'd handle my account a lot different than I am. Don't get me wrong the money still matters, but growing it organically over time with people supporting me for being who I am means a lot more than trying to change who I am to get the best rewards. I know you are not advocating this. I am just rambling.
I am waiting to see what this COMMUNITY thing they've been talking about for months will be as it could dramatically change the landscape of how steem/it works. I don't know if it will, I know almost nothing about it other than it is in works. There are talks of more tokens which tons of people love, but to me it sounds like further complicating things which is not the direction to go I'd think. You don't want it more complicated. Though that is going ot happen (the token thing) and it may not be as bad as I am imagining in terms of adding complexity. I don't use bitshares for example because I find it a pain in the ass. I have trail tokens I don't do anything with because working with open ledger (especially if you have password issues) is a total pain in the ass. I spent 3 hours setting up streemian, steemtrail, etc. I am also very technically minded. If it takes that long for someone like me then it is not going to be very accessible to most of the community.
I actually do appreciate your rambling ;). @felixxx made a very similar point that was hard for me to dispute. He is a curator and the creator of @deutschbot that he organicly grew, so he was kind of pissed to see @germain-trail just be made out of nothingness.
The two of them also had a debate that was just an exchange add homines, before that I thought the #deutsch comuunity and their curators are actually quite united.... I was disappointed to say the least.
I spectaculary failed at making my Streemian account. I thought I needed to make one for the politics-trail account but I actually did not need to, since it already got one. My personal account is not on Streemian.
For the sake of transparency let me tell you how the trail works from the inside:
We have 2 official ways of promoting: Voting (like any other acc) and posting it in certain channels of discord (They may or may not get promoted after posting them there). However me and appearently some others trailers thought there might a third. We get high visibility due to the votes on our posts and I thought "hey, why not use that visibility for promotion.
After reading the critics towards that approach I went and looked back at the people I mentioned in my overviews... it was rather disheartening to see them not growing in value, especially the one of new authors.
To present the side of the people who are behind the community-trails, a position that I am actually quite curious to get your opinion on: They see
it as a job and many of them do work hard to be engaging and make valuable posts. Steemtrail in itself can be viewed as a company that has a social/good intended goal - promoting valuable content on Steemit.
Compared to a random real life company Steemtrail seems to be a good thing and I might go back working for them "part-time". My conclusion after all of this is that Steemit in itself is too strongly modeled after reality and doomed if there are no drastic changes. Maybe I will be able to initiate change through the organisation of Steemtrail.
I actually am familiar with how it works. I was offered to make a trail when I signed up and kept getting rewarded for awhile. That seemed to have stopped too. I stopped seeing the notices that a post was considered good and had been rewarded some trail tokens. Hell I didn't even get all the trail tokens I was already supposed to have. Ultimately I decided I didn't care as trying to deal with bitshares, open ledger, and trail tokens was a pain in the ass as far as I was concerned. They also were not worth an amount I'd consider it worth spending all of that time trying to use them.
Sure and their trail posts could stand on their own as the old aggregators do. I don't see much value to the community in people aggregating other people's work and then the people that actually made the work that is being aggregated hardly benefitting at all. I can tell you I was able to watch where they were using my votes. They were voting on trail posts, not the people they were aggregating. That has a leechy feeling to me, so I didn't really want to allow my account to be used for that anymore.
I am not anti-steemtrail. I support it. I just won't be letting them vote with my account any longer, I do not endorse how they vote at all.
I honestly do not understand why you(in particular) would support Steemtrail. It is a socialist intervention into a free market, but we can jump on discord by Hammer and Sichel inc, supported by the chinese company Tencent that owns the most successful videogame of the world.
I know it's Hammer & Chisel , but in German you would pronounce it very close to Sichel (Sickle)
On the other hand I don't want to judge people according state socialist memes. And even if they are, I don't want to fight against them, I want to convince them to fight with me ;)
We call it a Sickle in the U.S. too... not chisel.
We call it Sichel, so it is phoneticly very close to chisel, at least if you read the english word Chisel with a German tongue it sounds very close to Sichel, the "s" and "ch" sound are very close in German.
To me it sounded a little bit like a Verballhornung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verballhornung
Oh and just as an additional info I think China is actually doing much better things for the world than the US and Europe, see Africa as an example.
Just after a quick google search, even the guardian is reporting on it and there are much more flattering docus/articles
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/dec/22/the-new-scramble-for-africa-how-china-became-the-partner-of-choice
China is a long term view country. I don't judge people or nations by pockets of doing good or bad. I try to look and see what they've been doing long term.
China does great at the moment they have two of the largest capitalist ports in the world... Hong Kong and Singapore. :) Without that they would be in a very different state.
of course China has reformed itself so fast because of them being not hardcore state socialist. I am talking more about the "good kind" of state socialism. You know where you try to realize projects that actually help people.
Btw just realized that Britain and French are hardcore centralized while we Germans still have the word "Bund" in our BRD referring to alliances of city an small states that we effectively still are. We can finally be the first to make a progress :D. You Americans are awfully centralized between NY and LA as well imo.
But yeah, I am tired and need to go to sleep, but anyways china and germany will lead the world into a brave new world. Did you know that china always believed in it's cultural superiority and that we know awfully little about it?
I'll get to that German course so you will be at least be able to speak one of the two new world languages ;)
Ye, he disagrees that people deserve payouts because of no curation - when actually if you pay him via his bot randowhale, he doesn't have any problem to upvote you. If this is not hypocrisy - what is?
It is. I dislike any pay for vote system. If you want to rent SP than I am cool with that, but not just pay2vote.
I am not defending Bernie. I disagree on a lot of what he does. Mainly his statement "I let my votes talk!" instead of talking to me made me actually really mad at him!
I just think it is hypocritical to downvote the downvoter.