No I do not think it is ok to pay for witness votes. And no I do not think it is ok to pay for normal votes. But what did you expect? A lot of the big accounts support various kind of pay for normal vote. And that vote doesn't cost anything either. Do you expect any thing else for witness votes?
To me it sounds exactly the same as for normal votes. Begging, paying or not caring and moving on. I understand that running a witness costs some resource (money) but it also pays to do so (if top 100?). If you work hard, become noted, stand out and become successful votes might come easier. That sounds exactly the same as blogging for most of us. Except the resource is not money, but time invested in creating content, in doing something with/for the platform.
I understand that this doesn't motivate to helping with supporting the network and decentralization. But if that's the case then there's something wrong with the fundamental design.
The steem POS mechanism is flawed in a lot of aspects. POS is being confused with governance here. That's why I value my witness votes so much. It's my only chance of influencing the platform.
Paying for free witness votes is not ok, but paying for free curation votes is?
you might have a point there. I (for myself) have thought of them as different things. ie the normal and the witness votes. but the behavior seems indeed to be the same.
I do admit to using smartmarket to sell my spare voting power and to buy my votes. I was delegating a big part to smartsteem (bot) but have taken that down a notch. I have started re-delegating this to different projects like @steem-ambassador and now also a bit to @steemhunt.
I realize that my return will be less but am willing to live with that since it helps grow steem
I still believe selling my spare voting power is ok but I am no longer supporting the bidbots though and this has come through a lot of conversations with different people (you among them) these last weeks.
So thank you for the cool discord chat and for this honest reply