@the.masses account has been shut down :(

I am sad to report, that Hive account@the.masses project has been shut down.

Hive account@the.masses account was an experiment I started back in October. The idea behind the account was to share the private posting key with the entire community, and see how people would use the account. You can read about the experiment here.

A lot of interesting things have happened with the account over the past several months. Lots of people have used it to resteem their posts, to get exposure to a larger audience. Many people have also used it to upvote their own posts. Probably the most interesting part though was to see how people used it to communicate anonymously. Many people would use it to reply to things and express opinions that they would not feel comfortable saying using their 'main' account. A lot of 'drama' has come from the account, but there has been quite a bit of interesting material as well!

A few weeks ago, the account began to be used to flag a bunch of people. It was close to getting shut down, when Hive account@anyx stepped in and created a bot to counter the downvotes. (Thanks Hive account@anyx!!) Sadly, another person decided to start using the account for abusive purposes, and has been using it to post a lot of spam. There is no easy way to counter this, and it is annoying a lot of people - so unfortunately I have decided to shut the account down.

I am very sad for all the people that have enjoyed using the account, and watching what people do with it. It has been a really interesting experiment. Sorry that it had to end this way! It is very unfortunate that one bad apple has to spoil the whole bunch :(

Thank you everybody for your support on this project, and I hope everyone had fun!