steemcleaners does a lot of good but they are humans, they're not always going to get things right and these are some solid suggestions. Maybe narrow their scope for abuse on the chain and double down on that instead of moving into areas that are more murky until there is a definitive strategy on how to handle it.
I downvote mostly on reward farming with bid bots and plagiarism. Circle jerks are a bit harder since they all agreed to vote up one another its still in a grey area
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You were probably blacklisted a long time ago and just never knew it. It's this new (software) version they just implemented that shows the red (1) next to your name that now makes it into a "scarlet letter".
Marky's pushing for a "grand-unified-master-blacklist" across all the major front-ends.
Details here,
https://steemit.com/sps/@themarkymark/global-blacklist-api-proposal#@themarkymark/q6fmzx
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Of course it sounds like a good-idea, but these are just a bunch of self-appointed yahoos who can make exceptions for themselves and their friends at will and enforce their opinions on the rest of us with capricious and tyrannical abandon.
If the blacklists were controlled by the witnesses exclusively, then at least we'd sort of get a "vote", and we could advocate for a transparent appeals process that included some "innocent until proven guilty" procedures along with a standardized "road-to-redemption" for those found "guilty".
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