The Death of a STEEM clone // Whaleshares

These last few days ive been looking at what has happened to Whaleshares and at their incoming HF4.

For those of you who are new here, Whaleshares was a pretty large community on STEEM. Among the biggest on Steem at one time until they decided to go on their own.
They were lead by a whale account at the time called @officialfuzzy.

During their time on Steem their chat was booming. Extremely active. They had competitions, curation initiatives, all sorts of things.

They were a significant factor on Steem. Which ofc went to their head.

They decided that they were fed up with "something" that was happening on Steem. Was it bots? Was it Steemit.inc not delivering on their promises? Maybe it was simply that they thought they were more capable then those in charge or maybe they were just greedy. Who can say?

What ever it was they packed their bags and left STEEM to create their own blockchain.

For a while during the start, things went well. They were able to create the atmosphere of trust and made users believe in their ideology.
They would get rid of bots and bring forth a new era of prosperity for content creators! Unfortunately.....

All of that was complete Bullshit.

Whaleshares suffered from the same problems as #oldsteem did at the time. People like Haejin were there farming WLS like crazy. Given enough time, due to his investment he would outpace everyone in stake accumulation (something he can never do here) and own most of the WLS on the platform.
Then there were guys like @scipio that are mentally unstable yet were capable of gathering significant support from accounts like @blocktrades which he then used to gather poltroons and bootlickers around him and farm WLS to a high degree by voting up his comments. (Why blocktrades allowed for this, i will never know)

The abuse happening on Whaleshares got so incredibly bad due to the abusers having so much more power on Whaleshares then they did on STEEM.
Haejin here could have only voted himself with 15$ which has been easily countered, but on Whaleshares no one could touch him and no one would touch him.

Downvotes

After some time, the dev team on Whaleshares thought it was a good idea to get rid of downvotes. How in the world are you going to fight abuse without downvotes?
The most ironic thing is that STEEM actually managed to get rid of bots via downvotes, something that Whaleshares promised to do, but failed completely. lol

Until that point i was happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I have talked to them about them being fearful of the open market. I have told them not to fear approaching exchanges. I tried to explain to them that by hiding from investors they are making the WLS market susceptible to manipulation which will lead to the price going to 0.
They ignored it all. I even tried to get them to talk to Steem-engine devs to create a pegged asset so WLS could transfer more smoothly between STEEM and Whaleshares that shared a lot of the same community. They even said no to that.

After a while i realized that the folks in charge, as nice as they might portray themselves as, are simply...

dumb as a bag of bricks.

What they created is akin to a hippy commune somewhere out in the woods, hidden from the world, where a bunch of greasy pot heads sit in a circle, sing songs about how great what they created is, but at the same time they have to wipe their ass with a rock since they cant afford toilet paper.

Their insane criticism on making $ from posting

A few days ago in my Discord channel, one of our members @anouk.nox shared a "naughty list" that was created by a Whaleshares user.
Now i cant confirm who that person was, but apparently it was one of the witnesses in charge that has a dislike for people trying to make a few $ from posting on Whaleshares.

This blacklist wasnt a circle jerk blacklist since Whaleshares does in fact encourage circle jerks. It doesnt even address vote selling.
It simply lists people based on the simple conclusion by some person that thinks that the people on the list want to make some money

Well, fuck! Shoot me, im guilty too.

_Self voting, vote selling, comment voting, spamming would all be valid things to address, yet they do not.

Vote Selling on Whaleshares.

This is one of the most ridiculous things ill write about.
See, when Whaleshares started their main selling point was that they will get rid of bots and vote selling.

Did that happen?

Absolutely not. Their failure in that regard is so bad that a gif of Jim Carrey laughing at their face would not be enough to portray how big of a failure Whaleshares is in that regard..

Instead of bots Whaleshares has created what they call "Whale Tokens". What would basically happen is that you would sell your WLS for BTS on the market, then use the BTS to buy WHALETOKENS that would in turn vote you for more WLS then you spent.
@freedomexists was one of the whales on Whaleshares that would do this.
The problem that this behavior creates is that of a downward pressure on the price of WLS.

No longer do you want to buy WLS on the open market. What you want to do is buy Whaletokens and power up that way.
Due to the market being so small (daily volume is around 20$, i kid you not) his vote selling took a major toll.

At first all whales did the same thing but after some time most stopped and moved to rewarding contributions. Still, the damage was done.
Freedomexists actually had a brilliant temper tantrum in Whaleshares couple months ago about the state of Whaleshares. Actually ran into it today again. Its brilliant. Go read it. haha. https://whaleshares.io/@freedomexists/whaleshares-well-this-is-all-a-bit-shit-isn-t-it

Another one when he discussed vote selling with @whatsup in her short post on Whaleshares. Its all hilarious. Cant find that one though. . . .

A once proud platform with revolutionary tendencies, with aspirations to stick it to Steemit.inc turned into a complete shit show. haha

And im not even going to talk about the fights behind the scenes here and people getting banned from discord servers, demonized for stepping out of line.

....Anyways..

Just wanted to share a bit about how Whaleshares died. ATM they are getting a new Hardfork ready. HF4. They are completely getting rid of the creator reward pool and will pay out most of the inflation to stake holders and developers.

This will basically kill the content creator scene that is already small as it is and will make Whaleshares into a pointless tipping social media site without a community outside the core dev team.

Whaleshares is all but dead. Price is 0.001$, 1/20 BTS. The daily volume is 20$.

It really goes to show that above having a message and a agenda, you need to be in touch with reality and have a goal and vision.

Unfortunately the Whaleshares team was not in touch with reality and had no clear vision.
Shame.. Because Whaleshares had potential.

Just a few thoughts and ill see you around!. :D