I thought the consensus was clear and there wouldn't be a need for this any more, but here we go again.
The Hive Discord has been buzzing lately, with a bunch of radio shows, podcasts, or whatever to call them. There have been plenty of more or less fruitful discussions, and everything has been very positive and innocent. Until things took a turn when the topic of vote buying schemes came up.
As this topic tends to do, it split people into two camps. Basically, those who use these services themselves, and the rest who feels like that's cheating.
The discussion started with HSBI. While that project has been getting a free pass since forever because they made the scheme spread over the whole userbase and downvoting them would probably result in the biggest voting war ever seen in human history, fronts were clear right away. That led @acidyo to do some digging, and he uncovered more current schemes that never received much attention before.
Today some pieces were put together, and with this one I am fully ready to dust off some old scripts and get back to utilizing @curangel downvote power. But we also learned that we should talk about things, so let's try that first.
These are the transactions buying the votes, using CCD on Hive Engine:
https://he.dtools.dev/@ccceo.voter?symbol=CCD
This is the voting account:
@cryptocompany/activities
I don't know what cryptocompany does. I don't know if CCD has other use cases, and what its market looks like. And I don't care.
While I would like to inform all users of the scheme that they should stop using it, that's too much work. Thus I call to @cryptocompany to cease these activities. If not there will be targeted countervotes soon (which will include an explanatory comment).
And anyone else running or participating in a similar scheme, this is your warning too. There is no guarantee a vote will pay out author or curation rewards. If you engage in vote trading, don't expect it to work out forever.
Thanks to @acidyo for investigating the issue. This shows how important it is for the community to stay watchful, to prevent centralization and exploitation of our common rewards pool and promote impactful curation that serves Hive as a whole.