You speak the truth @drutter. It's very sad that if you're in the <$5 post club (like me) and you wanna pay for some upvotes to maybe gain some new followers, the over-righteous gang will come swoop in on your post and reprimand you. Meanwhile, if you're in the over-righteous gang, you can possibly shitpost whatever the fuck you want and get upvoted to the moon.
Bidbots were definitely crap. It made the content just terrible. But the way it is now is not much better, and pretty much guarantees an oligarchic economy. Hopefully, the next hard fork will start to fix that. Resource credits, SMTs, and a Steemit token might be able to rejigger the economy such that we can actually true tokenized curation that is the real vision behind this community. But it's pretty frickin' hard to get that just right tbh.
Simply burn author rewards and your chances of getting downvotes fall dramatically. It is kind of annoying to hear the work of ocdb as "gang." OCDB is spending countless unpaid hours curating content and making sure paid votes don't offer ROI.
The real question is, did you want to buy votes to earn ROI, or did you want paid votes for the publicity? If you want the paid votes simply for publicity, then burn author rewards or send them to Steem.Dao.
We do need a clearer way for people to promote content, the promotion tab is hardly used. We need to blend the promoted tab with trending in a nonintrusive way, so everyone can easily promote post by burning Steem.
Dude, why would anyone who spends time making a decent post burn author rewards? That makes no sense! Is there some kind of benefit to burning author rewards that brings publicity that is not advertised on the platform?
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If you buy votes you still get the curation rewards. We need a better promotion system, blending promoted tab with trending is a good start. If you burned the amount you spent on the paid vote, and kept the organic votes, there would be no issue. You would simply be paying for publicity.
The rub is when you buy votes and earn free steem for doing that, if you find a way to make the paid votes not profitable, then you have a working business model. Getting paid to advertise your own stuff does not work anywhere for anything and Steem is no exception.
Definitely need a better promotion system. Sending to null and using a bidbot (as they currently exist) will never work because there’s no way to tell how much yield (if any) is gonna come off those bidbot bids.
The problem with what the ocdb guys are doing is that, for some reason, the only content that gets upvoted is meta content. That is, content on steem about steem, these days, is the path of least resistance to higher value upvotes. So that’s most of the content that we see.
And that’s great for engaging with the people currently on steem, but it’s shit for bringing new turtles to the island. The key to increasing the value of steem tokens is creating a trending page or pages that will attract new un-Steemed eyeballs to engage with the content AND be inspired enough to join the ecosystem as a staked consumer and/or staked content creator.
And that’s almost impossible to do with meta content.