Let's not kid ourselves here, most users either want to make money, or want to make money. And if there is a stable way to generate a small ROI consistently then people are going to take that route for as long as SBD trades in a given range. Hell, SBD can go down and people will still bid, because most people have no idea how to do simple math.
It's actually very similar to minnowbooster, they're both middlemen for services that skim money from the collective everybody and hand profits over to those with capital aka SP or VP.
Rich get richer, steem's GINI coefficient is worse than most any country on earth and there's nothing in the code that would change that so we shouldn't be surprised.
Do you want to help me provide them with a different way then?
Provide who with what?
Offer them this, and the may no longer do that.
Flagging takes your ability to allocate rewards away from yourself, so I don't understand what you're saying. Flagging a post about a vote-selling platform doesn't make the vote buying and selling go away.
I'm not sure who is missing the point here. We are not talking about allowing vote-selling here. I have never flagged someone for buying a vote, or selling one. I have merely voiced my opinion on the matter and tried to paint a picture of the future it leads to.
But this is different. This is now(if not a scam) the implied acceptance of vote-selling inviting full blown dApps that will to facilitate the process of buying and selling votes. It should not be difficult to see where this will lead. Before long, 99% of the reward pool will be voting power reserved for purchase or auction. No one will have the votes to support decent content, because so many will be reserved for sale, and thus, there will be next to no incentive for anyone to produce a post of any quality.
We have already seen a massive drop in quality, from my own blog too, because I refuse to play bingo. If this is shown as accepted, in another 6 months, this place will be a memefactory. In fact, no. That would imply people would be creating original memes here. It will be a meme recycling centre. That's why I flagged the post.
It needs to evolve. We need to understand that the era of the blog's dominance is kind of over already. There is still room for technical blogging a la Medium, but personal blogging has lost out in the social media war to other shorter-form websites for good reason. People don't have the time or patience for this kind of content. Look at the engagement numbers here. They're very, very low. Very low return on the effort in terms of how many people are impacted.
From a personal standpoint I agree with you that bots and bidding for votes and selling votes and whatever the heck else is bad for actual social media websites, but in my opinion steemit isn't really a real social media website at all and in the future it will either die or be overrun by corporations or other large investors and our opinions REALLY won't matter then.
The irony is that steemit can actually cater to the best of all worlds if we stopped limiting our vision of what it could become.
How about you take responsibility for your actions instead of blaming others?
You decided to produce lower quality posts. Vote-Buying has nothing to do with that.
You could promote yourself, too. But you are not doing it. Instead - you're bitching about how unfair the system is.
What are you talking about.... I am not bitching, nor complaining, and I have already expressed my gratitude for what I have earned. What I am earning is not the topic of discussion here. It is the steps you are taking that will negate many other people's opportunity to earn that we are talking about. And if I were bitching, I would simply be pointing out and talking about how unfair it is. This is not what I am doing. I am educating others on why this is so harmful to this economy, and trying to convince them to stop harming themselves and others.
You keep trying to accuse me of bitching, and I know why. You want to lessen my words by painting me as some scorned woman. You do not know me at all, my friend. I hold no resentment in my heart for anything that has transpired in the past. But you can be fucking certain that I hold plenty for those who seek to influence the future in a negative way.