First of all, thank you for commenting so aplia and giving importance to my small vote.
You don't have to explain to me about those two platforms, I am aware that they are useless. I don't publish there and all my energies and heart are dedicated to HIVE. It always comes in handy though, for others to read and know.
My withdrawal of the vote is for the same reason I withdrew it from Arcange for this.
Yesterday some people wrote to me privately after commenting here, freaking out because they have had their votes reduced. People who contribute a lot to Hive and at some point posted on blurt. They talked to me about being blacklisted.
I understand that each whale or project decides their voting criteria. I have years voting OCD as witness because I liked their work, even when they never vote for me. But lately I see that they demand more and more things and quality content is put on the back burner. However it is not the same to have criteria established and transparently communicated to the community and delegators, than a hidden change with no way for those affected to remedy it.
These were people I voted for OCD and now I do not. While this is not my case, for many it is scary to lose support in Hive. Being scarred can be terrible for a family. For me, my community hurts, they are like my children and I don't want to see them hurt.
It is possible that many of us are sensitive to this, because in recent years we have been marked with political lists in Venezuela, which have deprived us of much.
On the other hand I always tell them not to go and publish in those places that are worthless, but everyone is free and I do not coerce them. I always prefer that people decide from love and not from fear. That they themselves realize that Hive is the real value, not because they are punished, but because they can be free without fear.
We are far superior than those places (ego aside) we don't need to police anyone. This is not good publicity for Hive. Can you imagine that abroad they say that in Hive they punish for publishing in other places?
And regarding SEO, I don't understand it well since we have several dapps and SEO would be towards them. For example I publish the same on 3speak and Youtube, the SEO surely prioritizes Youtube. 3speak has never cared and has always allowed it, should I be punished for that, is it different with videos?
Is 3speak upvoting youtube videos?
It's really not that difficult to understand our stance, these chains have shown time and time again how malicious they are against Hive even after we've accepted it for a long time. Blurt has an abuser as their top witness and constantly showers people who have openly milked and abused Hive with rewards, they constantly use our downvotes as a way to market their platform even though a majority of them are used properly and carefully to adjust rewards or mitigate abuse. I'm sure I don't need to tell you about their governance or their leader who runs a project here that mainly leases out HP to abusers trying to win ROI back which all of it costs the other regular users more rewards in the long run. As for Steem I'm sure you're also aware of how they not only stole stake from me but millions of others in retaliation for not receiving a hive airdrop because they supported the centralization of the chain.
While we're not doing a blacklist as directly as the one you linked to, we're going to double check how people post content on the other platforms similar to all our other requirements some of which prevent us from voting for posts of your for instance as they already do quite well and our focus is on retention of underrewarded authors and preferably newcomers. Though we do vote for others now and then as well it's based on the fact that we think they bring a lot more value to hive than regular content creators and content does, the opposite of this is those who weaken Hive by posting the exact same content on other chains. Bear in mind that this only for those two affected platforms which is quite a minority of the internet as a whole, the rest of web2 has users which Hive can benefit from the author cross-posting content to and maybe eventually inviting them over to here as they feel loyal to the platform that's rewarding and supporting them as content creators and people.
Either way, had you been delegating or trailing ocd with your votes I'd understand if this decision would make you not want to support our votes any more, but going so far as to unvote our witness which also stands for a lot of other things such as the security of the chain it's quite a low blow and just feels like you're attempting to do anything to show dissent towards the decision that a majority of others felt was fair and agreed upon which is the reason it went into effect. I'm sure a majority on chain would feel the same way as there's only a minority who bother to post onto those copycat platforms these days after seeing how close to useless it is and how badly stake is and keeps on being distributed.
I'd understand your stance if we were to say we're going to start downvoting users cross-posting content onto these different platforms but just because we're not going to reward them the same way as those staying loyal to Hive shouldn't create this reaction in my opinion.
I appreciate the time you have dedicated to this conversation. My position is very personal, in fact the vote with @rutablockchain we still maintain it. Because of the way I am I cannot support this kind of actions. I think the goal could be achieved with an incentive approach. Maybe the way I found out about the issue influenced it. An official publication would help. I will be watching how the measure is implemented. My greatest wish is that it does not bring bad publicity to Hive.