Part of the original and current potential use case for purchasing and holding SP is for promotion.
All Steem stakeholders have the ability to use positively weighted votes (upvotes) or negatively weighted votes (downvotes--mislabeled as "flag" on steemit.com) to influence a post or comment's potential payout for 7 days after it has been created.
Well, I can't really argue with that. But, BookingTeam isn't even holding the SP, these are "curators" immediate upvoting garbage content, which is failing at their task.
But if the trending page is going to be a stickied list of what's in my junk mail, then I'm going to power down and move my investment somewhere that has potential.
Because a mini-twitter that becomes nothing more than an advertiser's posting board is useless tech, and will join the dinosaurs.
If someone wants to promote themselves and not look like a parasite, they can construct some original material, not repost Huffington Post links in an attempt to cover up the fact they are just paying themselves $1000 a day to run ads.
This is far worse than self-voting, which appears to have everyone in a monster-tizzy about reward abuse.
You may also notice numerous people are flagging some of these posts, as shown in the screenshots, but cannot counteract the effect.
Perhaps after X amount of flags, your payouts should be affected or automatically declined. You shouldn't be able to buy the ability to plaster garbage content over numerous community flags on everything you post.
Steemit should not become a land of Robber-Barons.