It's a difficult debate.
On one hand, yes, this is "normal" in this world. People don't realize how abused all social media is. On Reddit, it's almost impossible to get a post on the front page without buying upvotes. Common accounts like GallowBoob post stuff for people, charging tons of money, and then buy tons of upvotes and get it to the front page. People don't realize how abused social media is. This is completely normal. The difference is this is transparent. I bought upvotes for my companies post for advertisement, and I don't feel bad about doing it here because it's transparent, people know its happening, and we have things like transparencybot that help make it more transparent.
Delegation has also brought a ton of amazing products. Utopian and everything they've accomplished is only possible because of delegation. I firmly believe that Utopian is amazing, and the positives of just having them in this ecosystem outweigh almost all the negatives on its own. To build on that, the MinnowSupportGroup got me on my feet, and I definitely used the community bot there to help my early posts gain traction. There's a lot of good that can come from delegation.
On the other hand, I feel like delegation (specifically, vote-buying) has killed the quality of content on Steemit. Posts like this get to the front page without needing to put any effort into it. No header, no footer, no formatting, no real analysis, no discussion about solutions/alternatives. Low effort content can become popular by just buying upvotes. Delegation has been heavily abused. Rather than occasionally using it to pay for marketing their blog/articles, many users consistently post low-effort content buy upvotes since it can be profitable at times, or break even for most.
I agree that I think it should be less profitable. As someone who uses it for advertising my product, I feel it would be 100% okay if we only got 25%-75% of our SBD back, rather than 90%-110%. Marketing shouldn't make you money, it's an investment into your blog. If users lost money by buying upvotes, we would have much less low-effort content buying upvotes.
It would also mean people would earn less by delegating. I used to delegate to MinnowBooster, but then I realized how much I personally am against it. I stopped delegating to them, and now just delegate to MSP and Utopian. Outside that, I keep my Steem and follow the Utopain 1UP curation trail instead. I get A LOT less rewards than I used to... but at least I know I'm supporting my fellow Steemians on my personal account. I really wish delegating gave less rewards so curating would become the profitable thing again.
I already did a post about this last night, if you want please copy paste into my post.
@transparencybot has been killed by booster because booster thought it was torturing buyers.
It came with threats of physical harm, to boot.
Best comment ever