Well, I did say people like Jerry. In other words: those selling the votes and using advertising techniques to do it. Creating a problem and offering a solution for a fee. They're paving the way to centralization, with a smile. People fall for it.
If I start buying votes, do you really think all of those people who haven't voted for me in the past will start voting for me just because I bought votes? If I see someone buying votes that tells me they don't need mine, they got it covered, so I look elsewhere. Besides, I don't like being misled into thinking something is popular and it sucks that I have to look at the voter list now before deciding to vote. The money, at one point, was a clear indication of high ratings. Now the money means nothing. If everyone places $50 beside their post, that makes $50 the new zero. It drives the value of the vote down, along with the value of our tokens. Value is based on belief and if $50 means nothing, we're all fucked.
That exchange you speak of has a huge flaw in the design. He said active members with high rep and many posts would qualify to use the service, not realizing people can buy rep and spam comments to exploit that "trust system." He used himself as an example as someone who would qualify and when I pointed out that he buys his reputation and spams blogs every time someone buys a vote, he denied it, but the proof is everywhere, so I wasn't impressed with that and it made me lose trust in him.
New members come along, they blog, they slowly start getting attention but many get sucked in to purchasing a vote and their wallets don't grow. If they do grow, it's at a snail pace. They don't give themselves credit for doing a good job, they think it's the money beside the post that did a good job. They end up feeling worthless because there's no reward feeling, then they quit or worse, they feel scammed and tell their friends. All of that could have been prevented if people would learn to start small and power up their earnings instead of handing it over to a middleman for no reason. We'd see faster account growth that way. People see my account and they don't realize it took a lot of work to get to this point. They just want it now so they look for shortcuts and people like Jerry and the others are there to sell their snake oil quick fix, that doesn't work. It's just watered down nonsense.
Me being here before this chaos means I can see the difference and the damage it's causing. New members can't, they're just products of their environment. They came here to make money and don't realize if you actually work for it, you earn more and you don't need someone pretending to hold your hand. People aren't even being encouraged to improve their performance because they can just give themselves a participation award and carry on feeling a false sense of satisfaction. That's why morale is down around here. The true rewarding feeling of EARNING a vote has been stripped away. I used to be in charge of a sizable staff. If I only paid people to show up to work, the business falls flat on it's face because productivity is low as there's no incentive to work.