Not sure if you've been following the whale wars, but ya, it's bad. Something to note though, grumpycat isn't trying to do it for any noble purposes. In the Steem Dev slack, people talk about how he's just trying to steal more money from the rewards pool, just like haejin, but trying to frame that in some "noble" cause. And it's important to note, he's basically a bot too, just like the one's everyone is using. His "checkthisout" account is actually him making fake posts, and then upvoting his own comments for massive rewards. He's trying to hide the fact that he is taking advantage of the system.
Important point though, this is not about decentralization. This is about incentive structures and game theory. Since the shift to linear rewards systems, the same change that enabled voting bots, it enabled whales to both control what makes it onto the trending page via upvotes, as well as for other whales to flag accounts that they disagree with.
Sorry to hear that he basically "stole" all the SBD you put into those voting bots. Super frustrating.
I saw the haejin truce but don't get what he's doing wrong. What's up with that battle?
I suppose it's all open to interpretation, but basically he was writing posts that, while "valuable" didn't seem like they should be getting $400 each. It was just posts about different crypto performance in the market. And he was doing this 5-10 times a day, and making that amount of money each time. And it was all due to 1 whale upvoting him every time. So...as you can imagine this looks pretty bad (no one person really deserves 6% of the entire rewards pool every day). And then him and Bernie Sanders (the account, not the actual person, lol) got into a spat about it...and so on...
Not sure what's going on with the truce. I heard there were some stipulations between him and some witnesses, but it's all beyond me. At the end of the day it's all just a good representation of how the current system is overly beneficial to whales who got in early, and it's hard to properly correct it at the moment.