Thanks, I understand your concerns and the need for some sort of promotional system. I'm just not sure the reward pool is the correct mechanism for that. Burning STEEM for promotion is a great concept, also a transaction between the individual front end and the promoter to get placed on their home page as well might work. A system where the content is marked as promoted and prominently displayed without bids, would also create an income stream for the front end.
You are correct about values. At the end of the day, I want to view how a post is rewarded proportionately. I am not required to recognize a transaction that you have made with a third party to get that reward.
My point is that no one can change or learn or rather no one will based on randomly enforced ad hoc rules that aren't public or consistent though, that's the issue. I remember a long time ago Bernie downvotes me a lot of using "steemit" as a tag in a post and at the time I genuinely thought that any post on the steemit site could have that as a general tag. He insisted based on his ruling that only posts about Steemit can use that tag and he would punish any successful posts that end up there and aren't about Steemit
Valid points! At the end of the day we are all sovereign actors on this blockchain who try to influence others with words and votes. The receiver of such words and votes is sovereign too. Sovereign in his or her right to respond to those words and votes in the manner in which they see fit. Unlike traditional social media who centrally sets the rules, there's a bit of anarchy here. There's no central authority to appeal to, and I'm 100% fine with that.
In a way you have to look at it with fresh eyes, as nobody is going to codify the 'official rules of Steem' for you. The closest thing we have are groups of people with varying stake attempting to exert influence as I have just done. If you're not in agreement, that's fine. You just have to accept that all rules here are ad-hoc for the most part, and the worst case is that we as honest actors both walk away with a differing perspective.
Agreed, glad we could both rationalize our positions productively
The point being, that it's wrong to make the same mistake, just because all the others do it. Be decent, be interesting, use bidbots but don't exaggerate it like you do on this post. Nobody likes trending to be a page of advertisement.
Okay, that's fine and fair