As a minnow in the current system, even if you make great content that does generate a lot of natural upvotes once it gets noticed, you will very frequently find your posts getting little to no traction if you don't buy an early upvote. The ability to buy upvotes actually transfers power from whales to minnows, without it, whales have 100% complete control over what content gets seen.
I wanted to test steem out from a minnow perspective so I made a new account and slowly have built up a reasonable amount of follows / steemit (still small bet steady progress) and I literally was getting nowhere until I started reinvesting my post rewards into early vote buys to get my posts noticed. Often after that initial investment they would go on to make $20+ but without the initial bump the exact same content would make 2 or 3 cents.
I don't think its a bad thing to give people who are confident that their content is good a way to pay for it to get noticed and the ability to reap the rewards if there investment in an early upvote does in fact pay off. This is actually a very simple and effective method of early curation that removes power from the whales. Without randowhale/booster/steemlike/etc my guess is I would have gotten nowhere.
Early on, I thought that vote buying was a huge problem with steemit, but I've come to believe that in reality, without it, a small number of whales would dominate the front page even more than they already do and keep most or all of the platform rewards for themselves.
Yeap, I agree!
But, as it stands, vote-buying is being heavily abused, not by minnows who try to get good content seen, but by spamposts buying heavy votes for stolen meme's and plagiarized content.
Buying upvotes on post shortly before payout, making correctional downvotes impossible, is the best way to abuse this mechanism "safely". I think that's what @grumpycat is trying to get at, and I can see that making sense.
About the issue I've raised myself here initially, the skewed discovery due to paid-for-votes dominating the trending and hot sections... I wouldn't complain if those were usually quality posts.
Imho. Paid-Votes for ROI and increased visibility, that's fine for posts older than a day and younger than 4.
Oh and... have you looked into the functionality of "promoted"? Initially there was a concept of "buying" visibility that actually benefited the reward pool. Too bad it's so poorly implemented that greedy whales can just sell their votes to greedy spammers nowadays...
It's a complicated issue, and I find it exciting to see the community dealing with it. I am not against vote-selling, it's part of the game and I'll much rather have it done openly than under the counter by some big players. But I also support putting pressure on vote-sellers to do their business in a way that's not harmful to this ecosystem.
Sadly, when I've tried the "promoted" feature I didn't see nearly the payoff that I get from 1SBD to randowhale or similar.
As a minnow myself I totally see this, I don't post often and would love to get those early upvotes, I even tried some of the earlier services but they didn't get you much more than what they cost, so now I refuse to use any of these services and rarely even hit the promote button. I'm in this for the long game so I don't feel the need to earn everything over night.
I am new so still trying to learn the ropes. I am not keen on the idea of buying upvotes and haven't done so far but it seems that I may have to try that out. Thanks for helping me understand the system.