It was only a matter of time.
Given the ravenous demand for pay-for-upvote bots, it was inevitable that someone try to fulfill the opposite need.
Personally, I don't care for upvote bots. They are really no different than vote4vote or follow4follow, circle-jerks, cliques, sock-puppets - really whatever form of buying/trading votes you want to look at. Their standing in the community as somehow much better than all the rest of what I listed is curiously inconsistent with logic.
Having said all that, they don't really bother me either. This kind of does.
That anonymous bit seems particularly troubling, but how is it done?
Drowningwhale is kind enough to keep statistics for its input and output each day. It would appear that it is new this month, and it has not really gotten going as of yet. Interestingly, it has already been flagged down to 11 reputation. This doesn't come as a huge surprise, as I doubt this particular "whale" will make many friends.
However, even though that is a very small intake, that still a total input of roughly 9x the value of the account itself. I attribute that (optimistically) to a very small sample size, rather than voracious demand for the ability to secretly flag others.
He's small...for now.
There is some unusual behavior going on in the transfers. Drowningwhale's wallet is loaded with transgers to "rgau1985". They move in both directions, and are very small. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.
I'll leave it up to my readers to draw their own conclusions from this.
I'm an avid supporter of generally free markets, but that doesn't mean I have to like everything offered in one. I'm not sure I like this.
How about you, commenters?
If you have any additions or errata for this post, please let me know! I will see that they are voted to the top of the comments, and will make the appropriate edits (if possible).
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