Vote selling is fine as long as the votes goes towards quality content.
That, my friend, is the problem. It very often doesn't and a lot of bot owners are either too greedy or lazy to unvote. Prime example. Guy earned 57 posting single screenshots from coinmarketcap.
The above is one I coordinated to get zeroed.
But for every one I am successful in flagging away rewards, there are scores that make it through to payout.
Estimated author rewards last week:
9.056 STEEM POWER
0.000 STEEM
27.277 SBD
Their payouts have been going to the exchange too. They don't care about Steem. They care about making an easy lick and bot owners hook it up.
I can run a script against this guy's blog and tell you exactly what the ROI was before we shut em down. We've managed this for a few.
Vote selling is too easy to abuse; therefore, I will not participate as a matter of principle.
The way I see it. If the author or contributor is adding value to Steem, we ought to upvote them based on that merit not because they paid us Steem/SBD.
Good curation requires effort but has so much potential. If it is possible, that is where I believe the economic incentive should be aligned.
Vote selling can be abused for sure. But it won't if you develop good role models of many selfless people. Advertising is not going away. Since there are many that wants to get in front of peoples eyes so they will find a way to do it. It's great that people take action when something seem unfair. We will be seeing a lot of that in the future since everything is now more transparent and we can see what is going on.
@phoninf
If vote selling were simply advertising, I would have no problem with it but it's a bit more nuanced than that.
I like @freebornangel's idea for people declining rewards if it is just promotion or advertising (it was on Discord). He also mentioned a burn bot which I think would be an interesting idea.
We know it won't happen though. People aren't merely interested in advertising but also maximizing SP accumulation as stated in the OP.
Never understood the point with decline rewards. An ecosystem need people both being able to give and receive. Vote selling is clearly advertising. What else would it be? I like to hear nuanced ideas more in depth.
Reward pool rape.
The reward pool was created to reward content creation, any rewards taken from it in any way except getting voted to you for content you created is abuse, imo.
What are you talking about? It's still is getting put on content?
Yep, but is it content determined to be 'good' by the community, or the vote buyer?
And the bot is taking the place of whale curation, they are dodging their responsibility in favor of easy money.
Crap posts and spam are not going to build value in the platform like properly curated content would.
Yes you are right. But the profits will go down... And then they will move to another place. The short term thinkers that will say.
Good call!