The problem is not that shitposts are promoted. The problem is that any post can be promoted, while STEEM does not profit from this advertising. The only people profiting from it are delegators and bidbot owners, at the expense of the coin price. So it's not even clear if they are profiting from this compared to a scenario where they burn a percentage of the returns.
Having bidbots as a sink will help the price, make it more fair to everyone (since you get exposure only if you loose something for it), and will also make everyone feel better about seeing posts they are not interested in on trending.
How does it hurt the price? I would say that it does not hurt the price but actually helps the price. Delegators and bidbot owners are hodlers, which is a value. Inflation harms hodlers, but hodlers allow their stake to be reduced slightly in order for high quality content to draw more people to the Steem platform.
Bidbot owners and delegators are the ones invested heavily in STEEM, propping up the value of it. The content producers are not the ones creating the value of STEEM directly, but indirectly. While the direct value of STEEM comes from investors buying up STEEM and holding it. These people want as much of an ROI as they can get, logically. Bidbot services were a useful way of optimizing investor ROI, while providing a useful value (promotion) to content producers with the potential of gaining some percentage of profit on top of the initial investment. This is shared profits, which is good.
At least, this is what I believe to be reasonable. I can respect that you might disagree.
Thanks for your long replies.
Of course hodlers like to have a return, but I would say that most investors are first here for many other reasons, not returns on investment. Also, most people don’t even know about the possibilty of having that return before investing in steem.
If ROI was a great selling point, then why not increase the inflation to 100% per year and give it to hodlers and delegators? They’ll love the profit and buy more steem? I don’t think so.
What I was proposing is to reward delegators, but reduce their ROI by 20%, and burn that 20%. They still have a profit, but they also help burn steem :)
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