Some really interesting points to think about. I'm not surprised that buying votes came with some spam and unrelated comments as there is a lot of that around.
I would also assume that it didn't make a difference in the long run because the votes are only there if you buy, maybe someone would see a difference in the long run if they were consistently buying votes but it could be outweighed by negative attention.
I can see why you would sell votes because it uses up VP and brings in more money, but I don't really see it helping small accounts much because although it would give them a little boost at the same time it would bring disappointment when it stopped.
There seems to be a lot of opinions on buying and selling votes and as much as it could be helpful I think it does more harm than good because if you buy votes there is no need to put effort into what you post, I also think it can take away from the community of steemit, I guess it just depends on the scale of how widely it'd done.
Well people spam comments on high valued posts in the assumption they might attract big votes too, usually thinking the user with a high valued post is a whale of some sort.
We've seen how some users have bought large upvotes for low quality or plagiarized posts only to get them flagged hard. Sometimes even high quality content gets flagged as some are annoyed by the bought votes - even when the user themselves do not buy the votes but someone buys votes for them.
But buying votes for other people has mostly ended nowadays compared to the times when randowhale was the only voting bot and the votes sold were small.
I can admit when I'm selling my votes I'm not doing it to help any small accounts. It's purely to get my VP to use for some monetary gain. I'm not upvoting my own content and I'm normally trying to help other users with my votes even without being paid, but when I'm not doing that I'm picking the easy way for some money.
Currently the vote selling/buying is according to some one of the larger threats for Steem ecosystem. Luckily we are not blindly allowing any content getting large rewards with bought votes, as users are getting flagged for disagreement on rewards.
Thanks for the input, I think I've got a much better idea of how this voting world works and I can completely understand why you sell votes and I think when you are selling votes to people that are consistently putting out good content then it's not much different than just voting for them normally.
I think the issues arise and people get frustrated when they see 'shit-posts' doing well from paid votes because It puts steemit in quite a bad light and takes a lot away from the trending and hot pages.
I think it comes down to how people do things rather than the action itself but steemit is still in it's early stages so things could easily be very different a year from now.