I'm a bit slack jawed by what I'm seeing here. On the one hand, a lioness fiercely protecting her community. On the other - crypto.piotr, a user who doesn't play by the established culture.

Hive account@crypto.piotr asked me to come here and take a look at this conversation, he also asked me to be respectful if I chose to say anything. Although he still sends me wallet messages, we have exchanged emails and this message he included to me in an email. So I thought it might be important to him - and here I am - mouth open and wondering - what do I say here, as someone who respects both users?

I understand your concerns Hive account@rhondak, in fact, I think Hive account@crypto.piotr does too, and as he says in most of his messages and several times here, he does curate his list and he won't waste steem sending messages to those who are not interested in what he is doing.

But is what he is doing wrong? I'm not so sure. Open to misinterpretation from the predominant culture, sure, but I think I can make a case here that hasn't been made yet, as someone who has seen the work of both. I hope so, because I don't see a lot of common ground in the other comments/responses - what follows is my experience and my opinion, and it's worth mentioning that beauty, spam, quality and, in the end our judgements of value, are subjective.

I discovered crypto.piotr a while back, while engaging in the Hive account@originalworks community. It is a huge, sponsored writing community that is interested in cryptocurrency and blogging, and they fit right in on steem. I remember when Piotr started testing different mechanisms for getting more people to comment on his articles. You know the real wallet spam, those resteem services? Yeah, he tried each one and did a write up about the results!. He started sending wallet messages because they work. In this very thread he has showed that he gets results, and the people on his 'wallet mailing list' stay on the list because they like to engage with him (or at least they like the dust!) He is also known to put huge steem bounties on Other People's articles to encourage discussion.

This topic reminds me of a great user, a friend of mine from Belgium, that HATES steemcleaners. When I asked him, out of ignorance, why he would hate such a 'fine, upstanding program', he said that they put him on their blacklist and he was flagged nearly out of existence, without discussion or reprisal, as a new user. He made it through, but with a bitter taste in his mouth. And a lesson that made me think twice about content regulation.

I'm not saying that you have to like him, but I do think that you should consider carefully the roots of ideas like - 'if you don't know the main players, you aren't a good steemian'. Yes he could be in a bubble, but couldn't we all be? In fact, there is a lot of drama on this site that I intentionally bubble out of my life :)

I am not a delegator to Piotr, but I did take notice when he delegated all of his SP to over 100 people (viewable on steemworld), and noticed too that others supported him in his effort by delegating to him. This is not dissimilar to what others at the Welcome Wagon do, as you mentioned. The existence of Welcome Wagon validates Piotrs actions, not the reverse. There is need for community leaders - we all know that! But in a decentralized community we are going to have many groups!

Here I will conclude - its already probably too long and I risk alienating anyone reading this far, but I want to say that you have every right to issue this warning, to your followers and your community. As you say, you don't know, but feel. I get that, its instinct! I just think that in this case there is a cultural difference, not a difference in values. We all really want the same thing, we're just going about it differently.