AskSteem: What do you think of the EIP so far?

How's everyone doing? I've been really busy lately and the little time I've had I've put into OCD and following active accounts from the whitelist manually with Hive account@anomadsoul and double-checking on some things. Feels like the HF happened just yesterday in a way but at the same time so much has happened.

From my perspective, we decided to first go after voting rings with Hive account@ocdb right off the gate with the HF and "free downvotes" (obviously the free part was a scam cause it had a lot of consequences with it :D), first one was a clean and accomplished mission, second one not so much as the whale in question started retaliating to any of the accounts associated with ocdb. Of course this was to be expected but I was hoping they wouldn't go as hard on the curators of Hive account@ocd and mainly target us casting the downvotes instead, but you know how creative people can get when they're out for blood and their reign of self-voting is coming to an end. Oh well after some time we stopped the downvotes there too as it seemed the account in question was starting to "curate".

Then we finally felt it was time to go fully manual with ocdb, this has always been one of our goals and we created ocdb with the mitigation of abuse and SP being in bid botters hands who were not planning on doing much good with it then or possibly in the future. With that decision we decided to help a few other Steemians out who had been fighting off bid vote countering as it goes against the EIP and undermines it. Of course this came with a lot of drama as well, bid bot owners crying cause more SP had risen against them now and they couldn't continue to make that easy and unfair profits and ROI so they retaliated as much as they could but overall it seems many of them are switching towards curation either cause they have to cause most customers aware of the changes stopped buying bids or because of the downvotes on their purchased votes cause that's the only way we can stop them from buying more in the future. If you're still not aware how buying votes from bid bots is unfair in all the levels to honest curation I can give you a brief explanation in the comments but don't wanna make this post too long, but feel free to ask away.

Overall I am liking the effects of the EIP. I understand many minnows and dolphins are not so happy to see their own vote lose value to the curve tax which is there mostly for spammy/farmy abuse on comments and posts all over the platform but I am hoping that the incentivized curation is making up for that. That's why we at ocd&b are trying our best to find as many authors as possible along with our whitelist to follow and curate on a regular basis, we understand the problems with big accounts maximizing their ROI by front-running popular authors, we understand the problems with many accounts losing out not just due to the 50/50 change and the SPS but also because of the curve and that's why we're trying our best to mainly curate accounts that don't get those circlejerk upvotes.

We are off to a great start I believe, even though the price does not reflect it, it's too dependent on BTC still as it's main trading pair and not so easy access to fiat for those new to the scene. I also understand that the curve has hurt comment rewarding and automatically brought down engagement due to it in some cases but I am hopeful that we will be able to figure out solutions to it in one way or another. I am still looking forward to communities and SMT's after it hopefully some time soon, until then all we can do is curate, distribute and onboard. Our chain and front-ends still have so much to offer that other centralized platforms don't. Getting the rewards and economics of it all right is not an easy task and not many are even close to perfecting it nor will they ever be able to.

I'm having a little bit of jet lag lately and I may fall asleep after writing this post but as always I'll get back to reading/replying to your comments the next time.

AskSteem: What do you think of #newsteem so far?

Remember that every downvote is an upvote to everyone else. ;)