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 ^_^