Over the last 2 years we've had a vote selling system where buyers get paid to promote, while sellers get to make as much as 100% self voting

Just take a moment to think about that.

Can this possibly be sustainable? Some magical win win with no cost?

If we pay people to promote on here, we're by definition ensuring that ad space on our platform is worth less than nothing. If stakeholders can take back 100% of their voting rewards, who's going to settle for 25% (back then) curating honestly? If very few are curating honestly, who's going to create half decent content? If very few are creating half decent content, then the only things left on our trending and indeed platform at large are ads and farm posts. How much would you say ad space on a platform almost exclusively comprised of ads and farm posts is worth? Less than nothing sounds about right.

The success of our platform depends on our ability to deliver a sensible form of proof of brain content discovery and rewards system. In other words our success depends on our ability to incentivize our stakeholders to curate in accordance with their honest appraisal of content (or at least delegate that job).

You can't have another form of staking returns, such as vote selling, that entirely out-competes honest curation without undermining our core value proposition.

Promotion shouldn't be in direct competition with honest voting. With NewSteem, everyone has the tools to fight promotion that's used in this way. We fight for the platform by making vote selling as unprofitable as possible, or at least less profitable than curating. Because if not, they'll be virtually no one left curating and we're back in the dark ages.

There's a place for promotion, and many ways in which it can be delivered without undermining our core proof of brain values. And while I have no fucking clue why official promoted posts are segregated into their own section to ensure that no one ever sees them rather than inter-spaced between real content, the economics of burning Steem for eyeballs at least isn't directly self defeating for our ecosystem as a whole.