@papa-pepper asked me my opinion on this issue weeks ago when he wrote his post here. I have read through the whole post and all the comments a couple times. I have spent weeks pondering this very difficult question. I have wanted to write about it for a while now, but I have so much going on and it is a very complex/difficult and controversial topic which I generally stay away from, because if you piss off a whale around here it's a huge waste of time and resources.

I have a great amount of respect for @papa-pepper as he is one of the most committed Steemians on the platform and has contributed a vast amount of content of which is exemplary as a standard. I have also known him since I first got on Steemit way back in the day. He linked a photo of his beard on my introduction post haha.

Basically in summary of the post, @papa-pepper is asking the community what is to be done, especially the whales and Steemit Inc.

The consensus seems to be that there should be something done and that limiting the posting amount to 4 per day was a viable solution.

First, I want to address the haejin issue by itself, because in all honesty I have no desire to say what anyone should do, let alone a whole group of people. So in that sense I have no opinion as I truly believe in Freedom. With that being, said I do have a LOT of opinions about the varying layers of complexity in this matter.

It seems pretty obvious to me that Ranchorelaxo is either Haejin himself or has an exclusive deal with him, as rancho ONLY votes for haejin and interacts with Steem in no other apparent way. In truth, I don't actually see a problem with this, however what I do have a problem with is that Haejin pretends like rancho votes for him because his content is somehow so special. I respect honesty/transparency, not deception/manipulation.

It is also apparent that he posts so many times a day because he is trying to get the most rancho votes as possible, yet he tries to pretend like it's because his "fans" want him to post 10 times a day. Yet if you look through almost every post, 99% of the rewards for every single post are due to Haejin and Rancho EXCLUSIVELY. There are quite a few minnow votes too, but the value is almost exclusively 1 entity. It is not hard to create hundreds of minnow accounts and set them to auto upvote your main account. So in conclusion, all these "fans" don't really mean too much IMO. This just appears to be MORE deception/manipulation.

Finally, I have not seen any evidence to show that his charts/predictions are very valuable. In FACT most of the predictions that he has made if not ALL that I have paid attention to for selfish interest have NOT been accurate. Now of course it's not easy to do, and most people actually are not very consistently accurate in this crazy volatile market. The ONLY time I have seen him to be accurate was back when basically EVERY crypto was going up and thus pretty easy to predict gains.....

So all in all I have very little respect or like for Haejin. On top of this, I have seen plenty of evidence to show that he has actually hurt a lot of decent people in this community with tyrannical flagging. I don't believe flagging is wrong, just like guns aren't inherently wrong. The question is how do you use them? It seems very apparent that he has used them to silence people asking questions or saying things he didn't like because he is so manipulative and deceptive. I have also very rarely ever seen him respond to any comments or give comments upvotes even legit ones.

In conclusion, it doesn't seem like haejin cares about this community at all except for the huge payouts he is getting.

So that addresses my opinions on Haejin. Now for addressing the much bigger issue which is the discussion of how to deal with it.

I personally do not like the idea of limiting posts to 4 per day. Not because it influences me at all - in truth, I don't think that I have ever made 4 blogs in one day. It is simply that I love freedom, and this is by far the most uncensored and freedom based social media platform on earth. "Rules" are not about freedom.

Making rules that affect everyone simply because there is one or a few people being disrespectful is not a solution IMO. In fact, that reminds me of how the fucked up bureaucracy of USA and other tyrannical governments work. "Oh look someone used a gun irresponsibly, now let's make it illegal for anyone to have them. Oh someone got hurt using food grade hydrogen peroxide, now lets make it illegal for everyone!" etc etc.

I believe in freedom and responsibility. So I full heartedly disagree with more rules/limitations. Yes, people abuse freedom, but rules impose less freedom on the responsible ones too...

The truth is that scammers are going to scam, and rules just make it harder for the ones following the rules. It is so easy to create alt accounts and just spread the SP amongst them, or to simply upvote comments. Rancho and Haejin use almost exclusively 100% of their voting power on Haejin, so even with a rule of 4 posts a day you still have the exact amount of SP to combat either way....Rules don't deal with scammers, they only limit the ones who follow rules.

What I like more is that guilds form and choose to band together to oppose something they feel is wrong, which we have seen happen. Accounts like @fulltimegeek, @hendrix22, and others have shown not fully successful but honorable and powerful examples of this.

Also despite whatever anyone may thing about @berniesanders he has done more than anyone I am aware of to try and counter the rewardpoolrape by Haejin. He has done this by using his own time and finances to counter what he believed in. We may not all agree on everything but this is what people should be doing. If you want to stop or influence something that put your time and resources on the line.

Real solutions are not in people doing things for us, but us creating what it is for our selfs.

Leave it up to the free market. Petition the community to NOT upvote Haejin or to use their SP to downvote or delegate to a guild. This to me seems much more in alignment with freedom and responsibility. A free market solution.

Just as rancho can use SP however it wants, so can we. Then, when there is no longer incentive to post 10 times a day it will stop, or haejin will just leave. I do feel we need some kind of community flagging guild, but again the problem will be who is right and who is wrong? Who decides? It is very difficult, very tricky. That is why I love the free market. Let it decide, decentralize as much as possible, provide as much freedom as possible for people to act how they will, and let the community decide its value.

So in conclusion, I do not feel that Haejin's contributions to this community are worth such high rewards in such a short amount of time, yet I do not feel imposing rules on EVERYONE based on one person's actions we do not like is fair or in support of freedom. Also, I think that even if we did make rules, it would not actually work on anyone besides the people who follow rules - which are NOT the ones we are trying to deal with here.

I believe in this community and see a bright future. It is up to us to propose solutions, communicate, and work together for common purpose. Disagreements will be guaranteed, but fighting doesn't help. Working together for what we see as the ideal is what brings great progress. We simply have to be also able to live and let live. Nothing will ever be perfect, not even Steem.

I am now doing 50/50 payout posts simply because the payout is more valuable that way atm, but I will be converting it all to $teem to continue my perfect record of cashing out ZERO $teem nor ever powering down, thus powering up!

I appreciate your support and am grateful to be here in the SteemVortex. I welcome any feedback you have and if you feel I am valuable to this community please share an upvote!

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