I'm going to put this out here so it's clear as this message is being sent to pretty much everyone on Steemit that has more than 5 SP.

@ran-a-banana was banned from @buildawhale about a month ago for spam and stealing images. He lost I believe 2 SBD due to our no refund policy on blacklisted users. This is before we blacklisted dmania and steepshot (due to the massive abuse caused by them and the low to zero effort content created.

I told @ran-a-banana I would look into his case because he lost 2 SBD as he was manually blacklisted prior to the black listing of the dmania tag (which is a refund case). I looked into his case and decided since he stole most of his memes from Reddit, Tumbler, and other sites I felt it was nothing something I would refund. Prior to making a decision, he harassed me and my staff on our Discord.

During the next 30 days, he posted 2-5 memes a day stating the blacklist is a fraud and a scam while upvoting them for $10-30 with bid bots. I left it alone as there is no reasoning with people who are upset with the blacklist, I am frequently flagged, abused, and threatened as a result of blacklisting people. Something that costs me an endless amount of time and means my bot makes far less than any other bot at equal SP as spammers are the most profitable users. That can be confirmed by looking at the SteemBotTracker and seeing @buildawhale frequently has 5-100% positive ROI where most pots are -5-45% ROI.

@ran-a-banana and @garudi both have hijacked my threads and post endless memes about myself, @buildawhale, and our blacklist.

I could go on, it's been going on for 30 days 2-5 each all pounded by vote bots. I left it alone until recently when I started flagging some of the slanderous ones. My threads started getting hijacked more, so I decided every time he wastes my time I would flag a post that he either slanders me or uses a stolen image. Needless to say, this went on a for a bit today.

I am getting tired of having to deal with flags, abuse, and threats while trying to clean the garbage on this platform and prevent my bot being used to reward it.

This brings me to another issue, something that has driven the amount of spam into overdrive... dmania.

Dmania posts are reward with $10-100 or so votes based on how many rewards they have in the post and some other criteria. This creates an incentive to buy lots of bid bot votes on memes to fish for those large votes. The typical dmania user posts 5 or more memes a day, the majority of them are not original and just stolen from Reddit, Facebook, Tumbler, or their grand mother's inbox.

This is the type of reward you can get from @dmania for a meme.

The meme for this reward?

Just another one of the thousands of stolen images daily submitted to dmania. Not original content, not proof of brain, just whatever they can find in the first 2 seconds of opening Google or Reddit. That post is rewarded $75 USD and it's something a 5-year-old could likely be trained to do.

So yes, I flagged his posts, not to censor him, not to "kill his voice", but because he won't stop slandering or harassing me over his 2 SBD and 90% of his content is stolen.

Just today he received $45 dollars from Dmania for this:

I hate flagging, it's a waste of time and money, but when you blacklist users for the abuse they don't stop harassing and they get abusive.

Either we want to accept the spam and be willing to let it get rewarded or we attempt to stop it. Currently, out of the 50+ bots very few bots even use a blacklist, even fewer update it, and most don't spend hours only a daily basis proactively hunting down spammers.

@ran-a-banana is going to see and respond to his post and the first thing he is going to say that we profit from blacklisting and it's a big scam. We do not refund for blacklist, this was clear the day I started @buildawhale, there are no refunds for plagiarism and spam. The main reason behind this is because these users have profited likely for a long time before getting caught by abusing our bot as well as others, and any refund we give will just be given to another bot that doesn't blacklist (which out of the 50+ here, I'd say 45+ don't blacklist because of these reasons and the loss of revenue). I also spend an insane amount of time researching, verifying, blocking, flagging, and dealing with the retaliation as a result of trying to make Steemit better.

My original plan was to create a global blacklist and funds were going to go to that project, but since then I lost @freedom's vote which pushed me from #38 witness to #59, and my delegator increased my rent over 200%. I still spend 10-40 hours finding and preventing spam from being rewarded using @buildawhale. I share my blacklist with whoever is willing to take it (currently no one, but in the past, a couple have taken me up on it) so that all the bots can help enforce this standard.

So if you got a memo about this, now you know the situation.

To be honest, I'm tired of posting about spam, I'm tired of putting the posts in trending, but I was accused of enabling spam because I wasn't public about it. Not everyone agrees with bid bots, but bid bots do not create the spam and they don't have to reward it either. It takes work, a lot of work and people are going to be pissed, and they are going to kick and scream and retaliate as long as no one wants to spend their voting power to discourage this behavior.