no offense taken, what you say makes sense and I agree. "if you can't beat them... join them" is partly my reasoning for promoting here, I found the contest from someone abusively spamming (I won't mention name since I don't wish to cause them any harm), but their approach didn't sit right with me, it wasn't favoring the people helping them at all in fact it was a detriment because of the spam. I really hope they don't win... I think my promo is by far the lesser of the many evils that show up in vote contests, and personally I think if I were to ask for votes without offering anything in return to the minnows helping it would be rude, especially if I stand to gain a prize for the meme. Everyone contending for top places has promoted their meme and the original post by attrition in some way, it becomes a contest of who has a lot of friends alongside a good meme and something to bring attention, there's simply no other way to win a vote contest than to be responsible for a large portion of the traffic there or to be someone famous on steemit that everyone will vote for anyway. I don't think it's a perfect scenario, but I think I improved it by joining by contrast to all the other kinds of promotion people are attempting, and I actually put a lot of time into thinking of the best meme I could make for it, and anyway I'm glad you like it :)