Interesting idea. Why do you think that, though? I've read some of those posts you refer to, but I haven't seen as much of it in the last little bit. Of course, that doesn't mean much. Still, I guess if they wanted to make such a point, this is the way to do, which means there needs to be a big reveal at some point.
I don't know. The more I see of this kind of tactic—do the exact same thing that you swear you abhor to draw attention to it—the less I like. And I didn't like it much to begin with, because inevitably, it's all collateral damage with folks who have the least capability of doing anything about it.
So, grumpycat's self voting on the comments on the other account was meant to make Steemit Inc do something about self-voting? If so, that's a long time coming, and as it is, it doesn't get rid of self-voting in HF 20, right? it just discourages it in the first 15 minutes, or whatever. Unless you really want your votes to go the reward pool.
Anyway, I'm not discounting what you're saying. It's a plausible reason as any. I am thinking out loud and working through it, though.
I am in agreement about flagging. Downvoting in my opinion does more damage than it does good. If the rewards allocated to the post are indeed being sent back to the reward pool where apparently, according to what we've been learning lately about self-voting and upvoting in general, it goes to the highest paid posts, then what good is that?
Stealing from one whale to give to another whale?
I don't know if that is the reason why either. The HF20 self vote issue fixes one small aspect of reward gaming, but as has been pointed out by people of higher intelligence than me about this matter, it is still going to be possible to get more than 100% return on a self vote if done right it will just not be as much percentage wise as it used to be.
The timing of the downvote parade is one of the reasons I think the way I do about it, because it seems to me it was about 2 weeks ago that there was a push for rewarding down votes.
As it was pointed out in other post and comments there seems to be someone (who's name no one knows), that got disgruntled over receiving some down votes a couple weeks ago also.
I do not know why the downvote parade, or if it is something completely apart from the above two thoughts. It could be an attempt to drive people away from steemit to a competing platform, if so they have not done a good job of advertising the competing platform yet. If we suddenly see a push out of a new platform to compete with steemit and part of the advertising is no downvote, then that could be a third thought.
I, like a lot of people, just like to speculate and see where thoughts will go. It is part of our Drama Psyche, where we just have to think of the "Why is this happening now" syndrome.
Ah. Okay. Gotcha. I know I don't see as much as I want to, so knowing it's at least partly trying to figure why someone would be doing this is good to know. As I said, I think the guesses have just as much potential as any. And even if that's not the intent, I suppose it can end up with the unintended consequences of some kind of action being taken, like you referred to with grumpycat. I was mainly fixated on his power grab in enforcing a 3.5 day bidbot vote limit. The other didn't seem nearly the focus, but it's true. He did exploit something that basically big SP would benefit from. And now he's basically all the way out. :)