RE: Open letter to @Ranchorelaxo and @Haejin.
Although I agree with what you wrote, please consider these:
Paying bots for the promotion of your work is not ilegal or immoral. It's simple advertisement, which everyone does for more exposure. It doesn't reward effort, that is true, but it's not wrong either if some are willing to pay money for more exposure.
What haejin is doing is NOT about paying bots. He has an alt-account from which he games the system. He paid a lot for it to get so much voting power, that is true, and now cashes in on his investment by abusing this loophole in the system.
What is actually harmful is how his tactics are ruinning the credibility of the platform with literally worthless content at the top of the trends.
I personally never paid a cent for buying steem. I slowly get rewards by simply reposting my topics from elsewhere (which never got any monetary rewards there), so even if I get a cent, it's still more than I was making on the other platform. I am not losing something by not paying bots, and I am gaining something by being active.
What I am basically saying, is that Steemit is fine for sharing content and bots are not its biggest problem. Self votes are.
Not even Self Votes, abusive or almost exclusive self-votes. There is nothing wrong with an upvote on your own post. When you're upvoting your comments it might be seen as abusive but a self-vote here and there especially on content will never move an eyelash.
Thanks for the comment and I get your first point, but these should be labeled as ads and obviously not so many of them. Right now they dominate everything in their path. There is a promoted section here that seems virtually useless.
I also agree that he saw what it was and just played ball.
I think the bigger issue here is that the current system is the primary cause of tit for tat arguments on this site (around this central issue) over and over and over again. And rightly so. Something that is so easy to game by anyone with cash deters from (what I understood to be) its main purpose.
In the short time I have been here I have come across a slew of arguments being promoted like this. People fighting over bones or scraps because at the end of the day, the system is busted. There is never a perfect solution, but to have a single guy dominate the trending feed every is very silly. His work is basic and standard (its just elliot wave after all, don't get me started on it), and there are better ones out there (as there are for me - I'm not claiming to be better at anything but I always believe someone can do what I do better in this world). But he gets in people's faces. So he wins. That's the world here. And its odd.
Thx again.
And thats exactly how the world works, people with enough money to pay ads will trend in google or anywhere for that matter, doesnt really means they have the best content...
Steemit is still a new thing, and the system is far from perfect, but it gives authors way much more opportunity to build a follower base and earn some reward than any other traditional social media...