or purely by means of beneficiaries gained through the use of a project’s platform
Could you expand a bit on what this means, or what good examples of opposite voting would be?
I agree that there are many more positive ways to use delegated stake, including rewarding user-generated content marketing, or rewarding users for onboarding new Steemians who stay on the platform and are not spam accounts.
However, I don't see anything wrong in using all stake to vote on users for their contributions with content. At least I find that a lot better than for instance voting on comment(s) from a dev as a way to pay for development. Indeed I would suggest that it gets added to the list of "illegitimate use" to vote on devs as a form of payment (which ought to be done with a liquid transfer of tokens that the business has earned and can thus share to contributors).
Perhaps the point of your sentence was to stress how reliance on benefactor rewards only is not a sufficient business model to be legitimate for a delegation, but it looked very strange to place it underneath illegitimate use of delegation as it ought to be used for users doing normal behaviors that are part of the app and thus helps incentivise user growth.
Edit: I wrote the question(s) while the thoughts struck me. I now see that you answered the parts of providing examples of good use of a delegation. Which leaves me with another thought:
Incentivizing users for the purpose of growing the Steem user base
Incentivizing users for the purpose of increasing revenue which is then powered up
Completely agree with the first, but find the second quite questionable. Assuming the "increased revenue" doesn't come from selling Steem, I don't see why it ought to be powered up. Demonstrating that businesses can run and improve a business model that is sustainable and brings in revenue outside of inflation-based rewards, ought to be one of the main goals of delegations imo. To showcase that having Steem Power is attractive for a business, and thus creating a demand from other businesses to buy Steem and power up to do something similar.
Great points here. We will come back with a clarification to this soon, as they definitely add to the discussion. These illegitimate and legitimate uses of delegations came directly from the Steemit inc initial communication on delegations and with input from people like u we can get the input needed to develop the definitions and be sufficiently specific to avoid doubts as to what is meant
I would just add that these points aren't the only legitimate uses, so I suspect the second point was a very specific one that is unambiguously 'good'. In other words, it doesn't say not powering up revenue is bad. It just says that if it is powered up it can count as being good/useful. Especially in the context of getting to a point that it does not rely on Steemit's own delegation.
Good point. I think it would be wise to at some point encourage the high tier delegation receivers to have a public document explaining its curation policy and voting guidelines. At least I am preparing this for SteemPress. Then both the committee and the community can read what plans the receiver has for using their delegation, how they intend to do it, and then hold them to account accordingly and/or provide feedback on how the voting guidelines could be more effective or the policy more positive.