Seems like lately I've been tackling some difficult subjects. When I say difficult I must clarify something, they are difficult for me to explain. Why? Because there is so much nuance, that I can't help but to wonder if I will be effective enough, if the message will pass through the biased firewalls.

The Claim

Let's attempt to leave emotions aside for this one. Let's refrain from using insults, nicknames and all those things that are not really too helpful to the conversation. Because honestly, we got plenty of that already and this little blog of mine has absolutely no intention of adding more fuel to the fire.

Those who Claim that Pool Rape exist believe the following:

"When a selfish whale or dolphin for that matter upvotes himself, or herself almost exclusively over and over, this reduces the amount of money on the pool, thus resulting in smaller payouts for everyone else"

At first glance this makes sense, specially because it seems to go against the idea of this very platform, the initial idea that is. Content gets discovered, the best content gets rewarded, etc. So, it makes a lot of sense that I could boil it down to this simple analysis and feel frustrated that others don't see it my way.

But, let's dive a little deeper on this, again focused on facts and not on emotional reactions. These would be some of the things we would effectively have to accept as our truth, in order to not explore this nuanced situation.

• Most, if not all rshares belong to content creators, not to upvoters and investors.
• Investors must comply with my tastes. Hence, my opinion of good quality content is more valid.
• I would never do the same, even if I had invested millions.
• If they did not upvote themselves, they would sure be upvoting me or my friends.
• The Reward Pool can be overspent or over allocated.

I'm sure the list could be expanded some more, but for now, for the sake of my "risky" post, let's leave it at that. Granted, you are welcome to add anything else you could think of to the conversation.

Now, departing from these little bullet points, let me ask you some questions. By the way, I welcome disagreements here, I'm not trying to scream into an echo chamber, I'm simply trying to add some perspective to the controversial subject.

Who's the owner of the Rshares?

Attempting to explain it without using mathematical formulas is a bit tricky, but I will do my absolute best. However, if you don't shy away from this kind of stuff, you could go visit the steem center and engulf in all the nifty numbers of awesomeness. Everything is detailed there.

You could think of rshares as a hidden currency. As a token that expires in seven days and it's claimed against the pool. Think of it as an IOU maybe. As if I would give you a piece of paper that said, In seven days you can use this paper to claim 3% of a keylime pie. Granted, in my little explanation here, A cook makes a keylime pie every single day. Come to think of it, that sounds awesome, but I digress.

So back to the question, but let's move it into the keylime pie realm. Who is authorized, who is the owner, the one that can emit the little IOU paper for the percentage of the keylime pie. The answer of course, me. In order for me to have the right to print the little IOU papers, I had to buy into the right. Now payment, could have been cash or maybe work. Maybe, I mowed the lawn for the bakery (yeah that makes no sense, but indulge me) for months so that I was given the right to print a finite amount of IOU papers.

Can the reward pool be overdrained?

Let's go back to the pie example, yes, the same keylime pie. If everyone who has rights to a certain percentage of the pie, regardless of their capacity to emit IOU papers, have to add to 100%. Is there a mathematical way to exceed 100%?

Another way of thinking about this would be: Could I eat more pie than there is? Could I take more pie than there is? - It's of course physically impossible to do. This means, that if all the people who have either bought or work their right to a percentage of the pie, can only eat, consume up to one pie. I hope this mathematical pie is starting to make sense.

So to answer this particular question, I would say no. We cannot overdrain the reward pool, not mathematically.

Is self voting wrong?

Here we go, this is the controversial part of the key lime pie conundrum. Is using your little IOUs only to eat pie yourself an evil act? Before we answer that, let's add more questions to this, or more accurately more considerations. Remember, you worked for those IOU privileges, and also remember that when you acquired them, the bakers (blockchain) did not give you conditions. The baker never said, if you use this IOUs to eat only yourself, you will lose the right to print more and screw you.

Ok now, let's ask - Using all your IOU certificates to eat all your pie, Good, evil or neutral? - AHA! now you are in a pickle, and honestly you should be. Because all of us, as key lime pie enthusiasts would have to constantly think about how much we want for ourselves, and how much we are willing to hand out to others.

We could come to a few conclusions however, those who don't understand the power of sharing, the power of communities usually don't enjoy other valuable things of life. Things like loyalty, friendship, a sense of belonging, for example. But, does this mean that they are evil because they don't understand it? Or could it mean that they are blind to the other benefits and that they are thinking in scarcity?

I don't think using the word evil is helpful, not in the slightest, hence why I think that the conversation at times lacks a lot of nuance.

You may have noticed that Hive account@sirvotesalot has become a self voter, and honestly I can't demonize him for it. He bought his SP, he bought a big percentage of the rights to the pie in my analogy, and this makes it reasonable for him to want to leverage his risk by self voting. Now, do I think it's the most effective way of doing it? Not at all, but that is my personal opinion and I can't impose my rationale on him. How could I? I could present him with some numbers, maybe even have his ear for a second or two, but... Who decides? Him or me? - I think the answer is obvious.

What would you do?

To me it's obvious that not all people would act the same way, but then again it can be easy to say that when we are not the ones living through the experience. I could sit here and tell everyone who would bump into this blog that I would never self vote like that. However, I've not invested everything I own into STEEM. I have invested a lot, honestly more than I probably should given my financial situation, but in the macro sense, I'm a tiny investor.

What I'm trying to point out is that I don't have the choice to make that choice, and that makes my opinion not fully scoped. Because, let's say tomorrow I decided to kill all my community/social initiatives; What would happen to me? Would my earnings tank as I just start self voting with a "It's my stake, its my right" spam posts? - I think financial ruin would be guaranteed. Now, this is not taking into account the fact that we may have different sets of values, and that for me It's absolutely not worth it to be here without my community, but I'm trying to paint a realistic picture here too.

Let's be ridiculous for a second and imagine that your car payment is due in two weeks and you are in a financial pickle. You've been doing OK on STEEM, but lately your posts have not been making as much as they used to in the past. However, you know that if you post 10 times a day and self vote, you would be able to make that payment no problem. Now then.... What would you do?

Listen, you don't have to answer me, that's not the point. I'm trying to lay down some perspective that in my view is very much lacking on this conversation.

If the whales only voted minnows

How do we know what would happen? Do we know this for a fact, or are we speculating on the idea? - Listen, I'm not trying to be difficult about this, not at all. I'm simply trying to say that we have a lot riding on a horse that may not even exist.

The way I see it most on this platform are takers, not givers. Out of the thousands of accounts I see active every day, most of them are shouting to the winds me, please, me, me and me. Upvote me, follow me, me, me. Of course I realize this may make me sound heartless, but realistically speaking: What do you think would happen if say Hive account@thejohalfiles all of the sudden starts upvoting a vote beggar every time he asked for a vote. Would that account power up, support his comrades, his friends? or would that account power it all down and build nothing to sustain itself? - I don't know, but I don't claim to know the answer either.

This is not even addressing the fact that some who are angry about the state of things are actually convinced THEY would be the ones getting upvoted into trending. Something that is hard for me to get my head around, because that implies a level of entitlement that really looks pretty ugly, right?

Now, I'm not addressing their talent, or anything like that. I know some of them are very talented, I'm simply saying that assuming that "if only they wouldn't rape the pool for themselves via bot delegations or otherwise.. it would be me getting those votes" - sounds like a poorly crafted selfish argument disguised as justice in my opinion.

And then.. We create monsters

And that's why I'm "risking" talking about this, because it just seems to be very apparent to me. We demonize the bot owners, threaten to rape their families because the system is wrong, because its failing, etc. And we do this at the same time that we are saying to them, to the "monsters" - "HEY YOU SELFISH BASTARD... UPVOTE MY STUFF" - Does that make sense to anyone? Anyone at all?

What I mean by creating monsters is not of course that they are monsters. What I mean is that we believe them to be, we un-invite them from the conversations, kick them out of the communities, call them names, make videos on youtube about how "evil the whales are" etc. But in the same breath ask them to change their ways.

I can't say I see the logic in any of this, in the approach, in the plan per say. All I tend to see is a bunch of emotional personalities trying to make sense of it all, while not realizing we are all riding in the same boat.

Can we try more Diplomacy?

For the sake of the platform, for the sake of the health of the communities? - Can we see past the inflammatory language and talk about realistic ways we can move forward?

I don't know... But what I do know is that the ball is in our court... it always has been.