Hello, I've been busy for my personal occasion and sorry for late reply to your article. These are my answers to some of your arguments.
- We never blacklist people for "trail vote." Steemhunt actually DOES NOT COUNT auto-rail upvotes on the hunt score. ONLY UPVOTES VIA STEEMHUNT is counted for the hunt score, so we are completely fine with trail votes.
- Steemhunt is built on top of Steem blockchain, but we have our own community concept. It is "ranking competition based on which product is cooler." Of course we MUST do our efforts on making this happen on our platform. If we just follow Steemit's rule, what's the point to make another client website rather than using Steemit?
- To achieve the goal of the above, we should make a system that makes people's upvote can be related to the products, not related to votes exchanging or promoting by other channel. Again, we only care the upvotes that have made via SH, so curtails or bid bots are not the topic we should cover. The most action we work so hard to minimise is that people making a group voting pool and alt accounts, and boosting their posts by turns. Those group voting is completely regardless of the hunt quality itself. We think this will kill our core concept of SH.
- We don't blacklist anyone who just voluntarily upvote your friend's hunting post. We only blacklist when the person (or group) TRIED TO RAISE CIRCLE VOTING. That's why we ask an evidence for the reporters which proves that they actually tried to raise circle voting.
- Upvote-hunt-that-you-like-in-terms-of-coolness is of course the best thing we want to promote, but it doesn't mean that we stop you upvoting your friend's hunt. It could be applied to your DS (Diversity Score) if you constantly upvote only for specific hunters, but it doesn't mean that we stop you doing. Our blacklist system is working only for the people who shares upvotes together in exchange, or organising alt accounts to boost their own hunts in order to get the SH's upvote.
Anyway, I apologies if some of my announcement made you frustrated. The recent announcement was to point out for some people who misunderstand our new Influencer system. I will try to think more carefully about my words/language when I make an announcement.
Also, I don't think I can make everyone happy to use Steemhunt. I understand that our too-often-changes in the policy can make some people frustrated. I truly sorry for some people who were supported our project and disappointed about our operation. We will settle our algorithm and operation policy as soon as possible so that Steemhunt can be the place where product enthusiasts play around with the cool stuffs all around the world.
Again, thanks so much for your detailed suggestion, and I truly think that this kind of opinion always help us to think more diverse and review our operation. Even though you said you never come back to SH, I truly hope we can see you around in SH again and constantly give us some good opinion.
Thanks,