I don't know much more than you about what APPICS will or won't allow. Thank you for the compliments about the magazine and I can understand the dislike for paid upvotes.
The general idea here is to not post 1-5 times per day, but rather only post once per week, trying my best to raise the quality of the magazine with every new edition. I'm hoping the community will get on-board and we'll have more writers and content creators with it.
Suppose I want to give this idea a fair chance to succeed and I have very limited funds (I don't have tons of SP), what other option is there else than buying upvotes?
The concept needs visibility for survival. Let's keep it real, this is the first time you are commenting under a post of mine. Is it a coincidence it 'just happens to be' promoted with paid upvotes?
Actually, it is not. Once upon a time, I commented and won a cat meme contest you hosted. It was way back but I guess I have pretty good memory. ;)
If the project has value, people ought to vote on it without being paid to do so. Ideally, Steem would get back to manually curation and you would get those votes. But the greedy assholes have made it so that you feel compelled to pay for what they should be doing already.
It's fucked but I understand the plight. I've had the idea of creating a front end that filters out content with paid votes and individuals that excessively self vote. I think @emrebeyler just might beat me to it.
It's tempting to pay for votes for my anti-abuse projects because accounts need more rep to be able to effectively deal with high rep abuser but just can't do it man.
You certainly DO have a better memory than I do. :)
Yeah I agree some people ought to vote differently. I resteemed a post today that was seen by 40.000 people, mostly non-Steem people. For this metric alone, it should be acknowlegded. Stuff like that should get more and bigger upvotes, but sadly it doesn't. I can't change the system, so I adapt. I try to choose my battles carefully.
You may not agree with me, but I applaud your efforts. Feel free to act towards what you consider to be a better Steem.