well said, sir!
This was more than a rant, I love the correlation you draw to the arts market!
The annoyance of vote and follow begging aside, I don't understand what these "artists" get out of it. When this is happening it is usually a pure financially driven incentive and the "art" at hand is pretty meaningless.
You see it on all these promotion channels on steemit chat and the PAL discord. People upvote and follow each other without even reading the title of a post.
But then again, even meaningful art needs to find a way to it's audience, and to be visible you need those votes...
It's a struggle for the smaller fish (like me).
I frequently use @randowhale and the @minnowsupport initiative to give my posts that extra boost. This currently also generates a significant part of the "feedback" I get... and that sometimes makes the posts themselves feel meaningless.
Well... in the end it's no-budget marketing or a growth-hack or something. That's what the internet is all about these days isnt it?!
Good content will prevail and quality authors will grow out of it.
Haha, well said. They get rich though.
Then maybe not use them? You stand to gain much more by building an audience, instead of scrounging for pennies from these initiatives.
hmm... yeah... I have been contemplating on how I'll continue using these "tools".
and that's how I try to see them... as "tools" allow me to grow some SP and make my posts a bit more visible after release. So I am using these tools as a means to building an audience. It still comes with a foul taste but accept that as a growing pains or something like that.
In the end it wont be a few bucks from automated votes but the real feedback and conversation that will drive me to create more content, or the lack thereof that will make me lose interest.