I think steemit needs promotion options for the value of SBD/steem to remain high. Anyone selling their steem into SBD at current rates is obviously doing that to either buy votes from the bots or sell it to people that are, and because the built in promotion is such a joke these things are just filling an extremely large void. There is no way to expect large investments coming into the platform if there is no way for us to cater to the notion of marketing, and while this is a strange thing to think about in terms of art, it's a critical element to the system as a whole if there is going to be any kind of significant growth to the real value of the platform. Companies will drop millions of dollars for a week long facebook ad campaign but nobody even considers steem except in fringe cases, because for advertisers this place is not very useful, and yet some people seem to think making it go from bad to useless will somehow increase the value overall? This is not how economy works, we need MORE ways of spending the SBD, not less.
I can agree it's annoying to see random pictures on trending with $200+ when real art gets buried and has much less, it is not ideal, but that is a different issue in my opinion and one closely related to how you have a giant whale (cryptoctopus) autovoting everything you post, because the highest stake holders are often too busy doing more complicated things to go around curating everything that is posted, it takes too much time.
I think the trending page is damaged by the paid votes, but trending being a factor of payouts will always be a problem in one way or the other each with pros and cons, but at least in this way some people can justify more serious investments to guarantee exposure for whatever it is they want people to see, opposed to the promoted tab which does nothing.
Google has infinite money because of advertising, you know?
I fully support paid voting simply because it's the closest thing we have to something that caters to advertisers, and I think we need even more ways for people to dump money into having their stuff gain exposure. Let me buy a banner on your post, I want to give you infinite money for a 100x100 box on the side panel, what do you mean my money is no good here? This is the kind of thing holding back gigantic investments into the platform, because in the real world everyone is trying to sell something and a big part of that is marketing for some stupid reason, but enabling and encouraging marketing type things is how we get the billions of dollars dumping into other social media to move over here instead.
Honestly, steemit could be #1 ranked alexa but if there's no way for big companies to utilize all that traffic there's not much chance they spend their money here instead of facebook. They would rather go buy a bunch of ads on effing yahoo answers than get some SBD if it can't even be used to promote whatever it is they're selling.
AAAAHHHHH
sorry this turned into a rant, maybe I am defensive because I buy votes for my art, not enough to be on trending but enough that I feel a little insulted thinking about it in this context, but more than that I also have posted before how steem needs to cater to advertisers more in order to really grow in value on par with other social networks, so going in the opposite direction is not something I could get behind. I want to see steem explode in value but nobody seems to have a plan for where that value is actually coming from...
Anyway I hope you enjoyed my novel, happy new year :)
You just got a new follower. Your art is cool. I like it!
So there you have it. With all those followers you have and all the tricks you thought you could pull to get seen, you're still buying votes. I'm not the only one who thinks like this: Well, I guess you don't need my vote, you have it covered. Maybe it's not Steemit. Maybe it's you! I mean that kindly with a smile on my face! Maybe, on an new, innovative platform, it takes new innovative techniques to succeed here rather than just going to the books, finding what worked in the past and just applying the same thing here. Throw some shit at the wall and hope it sticks.
You can go ahead and spend all the money in the world. Feel free. I'm following you for free, and I hope to be able to have time to get to your posts and vote.
Maybe you don't want my vote? Those big whales who you think autovote me, are not your enemy. If not for people supporting and enjoying my work, I would not be able to give you a nice little boost of my own.
It's not my fault people here buy their votes, then take their tiny profits and cash out, instead of building up a nice amount to be able to give back. Don't blame Steemit.
OH SHIT... now it looks like I'm ranting!
Sorry, I don't mean to sound so negative, I just try to convey how the paid votes could actually benefit steemit indirectly, since most of what I see lately is either saying they are really bad because of the examples where they're used on trash posting, or small people are defending it from the perspective of "I need these to survive". Your perspective is quite different than either of those, but I generally take the stance that steemit as a whole could benefit from such a thing especially if it is improved upon because of what is going on outside of steemit and where the big investments might actually come from. In fact I think promotion type utility could go way beyond what we have now, make the voting bots obsolete in the process to solve the problems people have with those and maybe we get the best of both worlds.
I hope I don't offend you with the random things I say though. The part about whale votes was more about how it is basically impossible for them to go through all of the posts to find lots of things to push up and how that alongside the paid vote issue probably makes it seem even worse because a larger number of things in trending are from paid votes rather than curation, it was just an example I thought related to the trending page problem and in no way meant to imply you should have less votes for any of your posts, or that I should have more :)
The way i see it promotion was built right into steemit but the promoted thing doesn't really do the job right because in order for it to work those promoted posts have to be alongside the others instead of being placed into some quarantine zone. I imagine if google ads were in an ads-only page and nowhere else instead of listed near the search results or on different websites, then nobody would ever buy google ads and they wouldn't have had the infinite money to develop so far as creating things like google earth :)
[Chapter 4]
turns out it is easy to end up ranting about such a topic!
ahaha ^_^