Its a touchy subject that should be decided on a case by case basis.
For instance, bleeding out steem to feed the world for homeless is a fix with a short term gain, at the expense of killing the platform in the long term.
I think I'll elaborate in my next blog post. I feel a catharsis coming on.. :)
I'm glad you are asking this question. With regard to Bitshares, I do agree with it, and I did upvote it. Bitshares will end up helping steem users so they have decentralized way to change STEEM into BITCOIN, or even USD directly in the future via gateways. So it's a little different.
Bitshares also lost one of its core developers, Dan Larimer, who founded the steem blockchain, who claims he will return to Bitshares possibly at a future date. Soon the two are related, just not in an obvious fashion.
I agree that charities might qualify as noble exceptions. And I also agree that it's a touchy subject - I believe I know the answer in this case but I'm not sure really what the consensus is.
That's my dream too: Steem and BitShares working together for the same userbase. But the thing is by sponsoring BitShares directly like this we are abusing intentions stated in Steem's whitepaper and thus we hurt Steem's image. We help BitShares but hurt Steem - that's not a healthy relationship.
And by saying "abusing intentions stated in Steem's whitepaper" I mean this: the whitepaper says that Steem is a mechanism which constantly redistributes funds from those who contribute less to the system to those who contribute more. @jonnybitcoin's post clearly does not meet this criteria - he just asks for money without even trying to contribute anything to Steem.
You said:
Then you said:
However, Bitshares will contribute MORE to the steem system, by aiding users who will obtain their first virtual bank account, and first virtualized decentralized exchange, to transact with Steem.
So in this specific instance, promoting Bitshares via Steem is not against the whitepaper, and should be supported.
I think you're on the right track. Just you and I differ with regard to Bitshares. It's a bad example to promote your case.
It would be much nicer to have this same discussion with a more flagrant and easy to spot "abuse". Like hey everybody, vote up my post, and I'll get a tattoo on my butt. That's something that doesn't help the eco system evolve, or contribute to the benefit of the steemit community. That's obvious. It's your post. Have the last word. Glad we could hash it out a little. :)
If it was a Steem tattoo, I'd upvote it myself!
So this is my last word: BitShares has its own mechanism to raise funds (worker proposals) and @jonnybitcoin doesn't give a shit about Steem (that's my assumption - I might be wrong!) and is just using his private relationships with the whales to get some funds out of Steem. Funds for a good cause but raised in bad way.
This is quite pathetic - those whales are really rich (in terms of Steem), earn a lot each day by running their witness nodes and they could really do the BitShares fundraising in a much better style.
As it is, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Nothing to be proud of.