I'm thinking communicating better with our whales from Steemit, Inc. would be best.

Something like how when you get a comment reply, and it notifies you....

Once or twice a month, Steemit, Inc could put an alert on their GUI which needs to be read, which talks about "issues" such as this, and makes recommendations.

Socially, we're all confused on what is right and wrong.  It's easy to find the obvious wrongs, but some of these services which are well intentioned do abuse the system.

For instance, maybe we need a hardfork which says, steem power delegation can't be used to upvote the same user more than once per 24 hour period.  That would slow down some of the self-upvotes, and upvotes of your "other" accounts.

Do either of those resound as possible short term solutions?

The reason why this exists, is that it's a difficult problem. sigh.

What about a discord chat where users can post plagiarism/low quality posts/socs > mods will review and delete false reports and give a comment on the post  > whales downvote the post > if mods made a mistake then user will appeal in the chat > higher mods will check it

What do you think? We can also make bots to route whale downvotes. I mean, discord bots.

So it turn out that @freedom might be more about money than freedom after all and thus something like @free-doom might have been more appropriate. Interestingly a lot of [clues](https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/unmasking-freedom-what-the-data-can-tell-us-steemit-business-intelligence) seems to point to Steemit Inc as being the possible owner of @freedom, not that these clues prove this but strongly suggest so. 

I had noticed @freedom delegating his SP to some vote sellers earlier this week. I'd say this is a huge issue.  

I was in favor of Dan's idea from the very beginning and I'm still am. 

I also think that a none linear reward curve would benefit Steem. It might seems conterintuitive to think that none linear reward could help on this matter but in the long run I think it would. 

None linear reward incentives people not to split their votes and SP. It also create a strong incentive for people not to sell their Steem. The price of Steem should in theory increase as the number of users increase and even more so if reward curve is greater than linear.

All of this incentivize people to empower one another more directly with votes creating more meaningful connections overtime as opposed to the current situation where people are incentivize to lease their SP as much as possible.

Dan has shared very valuable insights on the subject in his post "[Evil Whales](https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/evil-whales)", more precisely under the title "The value of Consensus" and "Curation Reward".

> an endless arms race with the advantage to abusers.

Nail on the head right here.

Another good suggestion!

Do you think that it will take such a drastic step to counter this? I agree it needs to be discussed but don't expect the whales in question to involve themselves in the discussion - at least with our knowledge.

Hang in there. The future in steem and Steemit is bright. We'll get through this. Steem is still a baby and these guys are starving it. It can be dealt with.