RE: Regarding Unvotes
What breaks my heart is that for a year now, myself, TWB, and even Noble after we formed a team have endeavored to co-exist peacefully with PAL, despite some heinous backstory that I mentioned here in another comment. Cork never forbade us from voting Aggroed’s witness or any of the other witnesses affiliated with PAL. We even listed those witnesses on banners and other marketing media and promoted MSP heavily in posts, radio shows, and interviews. That courtesy was never returned, not even for TWB, which has nothing to do with Cork and Aggroed’s beef.
PAL members were free to come and go as they pleased, and some were even moderators in our server. They never had to worry about walking in to anti-MSP sentiment being blasted around public chat rooms, yet anti-Cork sentiment was a running joke at MSP. He’s not a perfect person, but he’s been quite thoroughly demonized by an entire Discord server, publicly mocked, humiliated, and gaslighted. Has he ever done anything wrong? Sure. He’s made some bad decisions. Very bad decisions. But they’re all quite public, meaning there are no further horror stories waiting to spill out. When it comes to bad actors doing unsavory things in PAL and on behalf of PAL, I have reams of unpublished documentation that I truly have no desire to use, though I’ve alluded to it a bit lately. My point? Cork’s track record is very public, so it’s very easy to find “offended” parties eager to pile on in contempt. What goes on with PAL is behind closed doors, insidious little machinations and management of people and behaviors to project a certain image even while certain witnesses climb higher into the realm of a completely centralized top twenty microcosm.
Most people reading these comments are unaware of the Sircock account that was obtained by prominent PAL members with the intention of humiliating Cork in an even more public manner. There’s a history of upvotes on related posts and comments from people who otherwise portray themselves as upstanding, community-minded people. Yet the same people associated with that account feign shock when Cork goes after them in public? The only thing regular users see is Cork trolling again, but they have no clue about the backstory because he never went public with it. Ding ding ding! The Noblewitness team decided to go public with it while he’s drunk of his keester in Peru because we’re sick of the crap. Just sick of it. At one point in time, we had an agreement with Cork that eventually he would phase out of the witness and the three remaining members would run it. WE, the three remaining members, quickly realized none of us wanted that, to hell with what PAL expected us to do. And when we didn’t kick him to the curb, the quiet persecutions began. Just ask Muxxy what he went through as a moderator in PAL during the later days. He described the atmosphere there as “toxic,” while PAL members, moderators, and community leaders were welcome in his Discord any time, and even allowed to moderate it.
We don’t need Aggroed or PAL to achieve success with TWB or the publishing house. And that drives them crazy. The only thing we need is the blockchain technology. If they flagged every TWB or Steemhouse Publishing post into the ground and trolled it and poached members, it would have little effect on our success in the mainstream publishing world or the fact that we choose to compensate our authors in crypto. They’ve somehow miscalculated this into being a war of “us against them,” when it never was and never will be. It’s sad that so many people expressed that they unvoted Noblewitness because of political pressure to do so. But all it takes is holding those remarks up to the light alongside the promise (threat?) Aggroed made to GMuxx, and we don’t have to say another word.
Let me clear up some things on this specific issue since I am the one that created the @sircock account, and because it seems you are a little confused as to why. I will do this for your benefit @rhondak, because I have liked you since we worked together reviewing steemit posts for others, and had always sent people coming to me that wanted to step up their writing game to The Writer's Block. I have no ill intentions towards you, I just feel you are misinformed about this situation.
This began at a time when Cork and I were friends, and he DM'd me this post on Discord where an unfortunate typo caused some unexpected laughs. I immediately bought the account when I saw it was available and even told Cork jokingly I was going to use it to fuck with him, but only did that once on the very first comment:
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After that, I started using the account to make immature "royal penis" comments to get a rise out of a few accounts in a context completely unrelated to Cork. It was short-lived and the account sat for a while collecting dust. Since it was doing absolutely nothing, and I wanted to share the fun I had before, I gave out the posting key to about a dozen people and told them to have at it. This is the crux of the situation, and what followed is a series of actions that taught me about the true character of @sircork.
As I said before, up to this point I had considered Cork as a friend. We had worked together for months in PAL, and even after the falling out at PAL, we stayed in constant communication. During the fallout, I had agreed with the points he and others were raising about another mod there, but we just didn't see eye-to-eye on the best approach to handle it. I strive to be loyal towards those who are good to me, and in that particular situation, ending a friendship plus burning a bridge because of a difference of vision on something so insignificant was out of the question.
Fast-forward to a couple days after I had given out the posting key to a dozen people so they could make their own royal penis comments, and in my Discord DMs I received some understandably heated questions about @sircock's first post from Cork. I apologized, said I would take it down at his word, but essentially warned of the Streisand Effect that would create.
This whole situation was brought about as a result my actions. I took responsibility for those actions, and offered my apology and what I could do to rectify it. To be clear; this account was initially made in a friendly joking manner towards Cork, but after the first comment, nothing the said or done by the account had anything to do with Cork whatsoever. In fact, it was in this spirit that I shared the key with others, as some random comment which had no relation to Cork was posted in a private chat, and the key was given at that time so people could given the chance to leave a silly reply to it and comments like that.
Despite my apology, despite declaring to do what was in my power to rectify the situation, this was a bridge too far. Cork had been hurt, and he had to hurt someone back. To this day, Cork is still the only person I've shared my personal social media account with on Steemit. I gave him a certain amount of trust I have not given others, and he took the first opportunity after all this to betray that trust. Him doxxing me in a vindictive rant to the public doesn't hurt me personally, as any half idiot can easily find me if they want to, but it completely destroyed the trust I had built with him.
In hindsight, I should have seen it coming based on the recurring patterns I've seen between him and others, but he was my friend and it was always excused in my mind as the other people who had the problem.
And finally, let me address this concern:
He never brought it public because it's a half-truth. He was only able to get away with it in private where you only hear one side of the story. The account was never intended to troll Cork, and besides the one exception explained above, it never has. And even that exception does not stand alone, as Cork had grabbed every soap box he could up to that point to trash talk and tell half-truths about PAL during a course of months leading up to this. Anyone can personally go click the link above and read this "horrible attack" on Cork, and then go and ask him how many times a week he slanders PAL or leadership there. On second thought, if you ask him, of course he's not going to admit to slandering anyone though, but if you ask me, his self-admitted jealousy is fueling a quest intent on building himself up by tearing others down.
What I'm curious about, aside from the vague allusion to "toxicity" that I guess only @gmuxx could answer himself, I'm confused why the unvotes are even being brought up, when you yourself admit that @noblewitness was explicitly sold to witness voters with the promise that Cork was leaving. No matter what your reasoning, this part of the agreement was not upheld, so complaining about people unvoting the witness will only draw attention to your ability to uphold agreements to your witness voters. What exactly is the point of this post? Are you truly trying to solve any problems? Or did you allow someone to emotionally manipulate you into a flame war?
I certainly appreciate you stepping up to talk about the spoof account. That shows more maturity than I've seen so far in the whole lot.
The people who unvoted because we chose to remain a foursome once we realized how well we all work together--those decisions are understandable. A couple of people have held some intelligent dialogue with Andrei about this recently and there are no hackles up about this at all. We get it, and approve the disapproval, if that makes sense.
The focus of this post is not the unvotes, although those add weight to our concern. The focus of this post is the threat issued by Aggroed to GMuxx. Because we have concrete evidence of it, the fact of its existence can't be argued, hence all the smoke-blowing and gaslighting we've seen here as an attempt to redirect attention. The point Andrei tried to make when he wrote this post literally made itself in the comments. We don't have to say anything else. Mission accomplished. It's all on the blockchain now, and we didn't put it there.
When we first formed the witness team, Cork was planning to leave Steem and did, in fact, for several weeks. This was not a feint. It was quite real. But during that time a few things happened. Nashville, and then Gatlinburg--we spent some high quality time together as a four-member team in Tennessee, and that changed everything. Not only did we all get along as friends, but we got along as business partners. We each bring a different skillset to the table. Take away Cork, and we lose an extremely valuable perspective. We're better with him than without him.
PAL and the larger accounts affiliated with it like Aggroed and Ausbit have not been supportive of TWB or any of our projects for a long time. We've all just moved on and gotten involved in different projects completely unaffiliated with each other. From a business standpoint, we were seeing no benefit from PAL connections, and much benefit from our collaboration with Cork. It was never our desire to choose between the two, and Cork certainly never required it. But when Aggroed smacked down that mandate, the choice was simple. The four of us are alike in this way: those who ask us to pick a side won't be the side we pick.