As Steemit is growing more and more people are finding ways how to (ab)use the system for their own benefit. And what is the latest thing? Paying for votes.
There are already a couple of services that I'm not going to mention who will give you an upvote if you send them some Steem or SBD. They will say that they are doing a great service to the community, and if you read the comments you will get the impression that the crowd is very happy about it. As if the sole purpose of Steemit is to post just whatever and pay for someone with more Steem Power to upvote it.
Why is this bad?
First of all, this is not the way the system is supposed to reward you. I was under the impression that you should earn your upvotes and not pay for them. I'm not going to be surprised if people start paying for following. There is a reason why mostly minnows use these services and most dolphins ignore them. Once minnows understand the infrastructure of the platform they will see a scheme, dressed like a good cause. What's more, dolphins and whales are way less likely to vote for a post that has paid for a vote. A shortcut isn't necessarily the best way to reach the desired destination.
Afer all why should I waste my voting power when you paid someone to do it instead of me?
When you pay for a vote, you are making the rich richer and the poor poorer. By paying for a vote the money is drained from the rewards pool for no reason besides making someone even more wealthy, when in fact this particular steemian is harming the financial ecosystem. You know who I'm talking about surely. Not the nicest person on Steemit. Making a bot to autovote whatever crap comes along is not adding value, it's reducing value. The same person used to flag whatever comes in his way, he even had fake accounts to flag even more people. But this is not personal, even if he has good intentions this doesn't change that fact that this is cheating. There are other accounts I came across who will upvote for you manually for even less, draining the rewards pool even more.
I understand that for a minnow to receive a 3-5$ vote is a huge deal, but in the long run, I'm not so sure this is the best strategy to get more upvotes and gain trustworthy followers.
Maybe I can make my own service and I will charge steemians to pay me to flag any posts they think don't deserve payouts. How would you like that? It's for a good cause, after all, money is put back in the rewards pool.
