**WHALES?**
Do you mean the bid bots you bought the votes from?
They took away their vote and then gave it back when you proved the text wasn't plagarized.
The system worked ok. We could have waited to hear back from you... how long to wait I guess is the question...and why isn't a top trending account not doing this first? That's a rookie 25rep mistake.

Let's clarify since I was there.

- You gave NO SOURCE for posting something that already existed online
- You did not attribute that article to the original author on medium or make it well known that you are the same
- We saw no connection to medium article and steem (since updated)
- We questioned you
- I for example specifically said if you can prove i'll remove downvote
- You proved connection to Medium
- Myself and others removed Downvotes (I messaged a couple others)
- You still had unsourced and therefore STOLEN IMAGES in your article.
- You sourced the images. (We still don't know if you have proper commercial rights to the images)
- You've taken them from a site that says "All images remain property of their original owners."

The highest downvote left on that post is from @kalemandra at 0.57 and maybe she just doesn't like your article. And @themarkymark at 0.14 vote 

I Mentioned that you should take some responsibility. You chose to put your post in the most heavily seen part of Steem. You invested money you should know what is expected. When you vote something that high you are the face of all of steem to the outside world for 1-2 days in that position. Ask the question: Does all of steem want your post to be that face?

You should also take responsibility for not sourcing your images and perhaps not having the rights to use them from the artist or owner of the images. They worked hard for that. Do you think they want a cut of that $600 now that you made with their image? 

The rest of social media tends to get away with it... but the rest of social media isn't making a penny off their posts. We do. I think people will let you slide on these posts and images and are being pretty nice about it actually. 

Your bid bot downvotes are gone, they're talking in your behalf for steemcleaners (which just fair warning may keep you on if you aren't sourcing images and or have rights to use them)
now the votes remaining just have a problem with your content and deciding they don't want it at the top of "trending"