> (back to the OC) 

took me like 5 minutes to figure out what this meant.  thought it was a reference to the TV show or something.   

I guess when you make a bunch of bad decisions, and don't want to take responsibility for them, everything seems like a 'game of blame'. 

As a side note, if youre the one concealing information -- saying the other guy is using incomplete information isnt a dis to him.  just sayin.

Are you arguing that giving the majority of users more say in the platform is not important?  I'm trying to understand reasonning behind this comment.

> Price is up 25% as a result and minnow/dolphins have more influence.

That's childish. There's no causality between the bullish trend and the experiment, on the contrary. If you look at the timing you'll see the bull trend started way earlier and when the flagging came to the peak, it stopped both in velocity and volume and now it's static. I see a bearish trend forming, based on what happened. 

The "experiment", which I supported in the beginning (wish I had waited more) was just a pathetic attempt at taking over the reward pool. There's no methodology, no metrics, no public announcement about how the experiment will be measured, no consensus among the whales, just 2 lines written by @abit, and those 2 lines of text are taking down an entire community of more than 10,000 people. The sloppiness emerging from those 5 edits in @abit's post (in which he downvotes pretty much everybody on Steemit) is unbelievable. Please be aware that this is not an _ad hominem_ approach towards abit, I'm neutral on the person, but the actions of the person, in this case, were deeply toxic. 

I think it's time for all to take responsibility for what we are doing and yes, I'm talking about this so called experiment, which was, at its best, a childish and egotistic manifestation of irresponsible people, and, at its worst (which I start to believe it's closer to the truth) a collusive attempt to game the system even more, for the benefit of the few.

I think that there were a lot of people who didnt understand what was happening with the flags, and that caused some bad feelings that were probably  avoidable.  Also, using the term 'expirement' was questionable PR, imo.  It implies that the people getting downvoted are lab rats.

At the very least, i would have liked to have seem more people on board ad-initio so many downvotes would not have been neccessary.  But with automated voting, that may not have been feasible.

Also, if youre a guy that maybe gets lucky once a month and gets a whale vote, and today was the  once a month, it kind of sucks to be  you right now, which is pretty negative.  Im not saying its a good enough reason not to do it... just that omelettes require broken eggs.

>Price is up 25% as a result

I think youre assuming a causation there that really hasnt been established.  IIUC, it was a pretty bull day overall for alts

Whales involved in this experiment are auto downvoting whales who autovote the 'cool kids' group. They don't downvote content that wasn't upvoted by a whale prior.