Upvoted for visibility. I think this is an interesting conversation for a number of reasons. First, the use of the rewards pool for promotion. There is a limited amount of Steem created each day. It is quite sad to see so much of it used for promotion. I would rather it be used to reward popular content.
Second, is @chbartist's work popular purely because of promotion or does the merit of the content itself play a big role? The answer to this question is obscured because of the bot votes. Frontrunning of bot votes further adds to the problem. @chbartist has been very successful prior to joining Steem, I would expect that would earn more upvotes as well. A few unpromoted posts would give us a better idea. The above statements apply to anyone putting their content on trending using bots.
We can blame vote buyers and vote sellers as much as we like but the frontends (steemit, busy, etc) of Steem have yet to offer a viable promotion alternative. Adding promotional services to a Steem front-end doesn't require a hardfork. So we can't blame witnesses for that either.
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I expect he could be successful here without buying votes, but he seems addicted to doing so.
I expect so. He has a very strong following here and has support on both Facebook and Instagram. I would love for him to test it.