While platform announcements / discussions should not be rewarded, there's value to their visibility. This series is certainly not worth $12,000, but it's important for the users of the platform to know what a co-founder is thinking about.
The simplest solution would be an "Announcement" tab where all voting is disabled. Another possible solution could be a way for low value posts to trend based on their importance rather than SBD generated. Reddit has the "controversial" algorithm which makes posts which have a strong mix between upvotes and downvotes. I suppose that makes sense - if something is so polarizing it's probably worth checking out. Similarly, perhaps an equal number of whales could come in and downvote these announcements, yet they would be visible on the trending page.
I agree and we have discussed precisely these issues for months. A feature to disable rewards on a post was added two months ago but is not being used.
There are many ways one can conceive of announcements and communications from the developers being made available to users without direct monetary rewards. Somehow virtually every other startup business and software project manages to do this and indeed I dare say that none would consider a founder drawing on a promotional fund to do so (for example entering these blog posts in a writing contest sponsored by the company for its users) to be appropriate.
Possibly. If you are an investor looking closely at the system, or if you happen to be interested in the theory and philosophy of voting systems, they you might find this series interesting and vaguely relevant. But merely as a 'user' of the system, you are probably a blogger putting up your recipes, photographs, makeup videos, art, restaurant reviews, opinions about the direction of the economy, etc. in the hopes that you get support from your followers and may or may not get rewards. In that case, you probably neither find a lot of value here nor are likely to even read or understand most of it. (Several people have explicitly commented on voting despite not reading it and others clearly, from the content of their remarks, have not read and understood it.)
There is a place for everything. High in trending with rewards draining the pool day after day is not it.
Interesting - so the feature to disable rewards already exists.
You are right - this series in particular will not interest most people on Steemit. Those who are involved closely would be following Dan anyway, the post need not trend at all.
However, broad announcements do need to be visible. Major new features, significant changes in reward algorithms, etc. Those are relevant to everyone using the platform.