I found a link to @reggaemuffin's post on a Daily Flag Report. You know which one. After months of seeing this fad unfold, I now feel I can review the general concept of vote buying.
I don't believe vote buying services have any long term benefit for the community, and they don't solve any alleged shortcomings with the Steem network. A few basic facts -
This is a free market. Like any free market, only a few creators will ever be popular. New users have to put in the effort and rely on considerable luck to "make it big". Historically, the free market has been particularly flawed with services with no objective measure of success, i.e. the arts, or any creative content. Blogging is certainly one such artform, and only a handful of bloggers will command a giant's share of the market. Justin Bieber and Michael Bay command a significant share of the music and movie markets respectively. Are they the finest artists of their generation? Doesn't matter. It's how free market works. As such, there's no flaw with Steem here that needs a solution.
Steem already has far superior discoverability thanks to financial incentivisation of curation efforts. Whether it be individuals, organisations or community projects. Compared to Reddit or Twitter, Steem has a significantly higher proportion of high quality posts that are discovered and rewarded significantly. As Steem grows and diversifies, this effect will only increase. On a broader note, Steem also is working with a much greater degree of meritocracy than the music or hollywood industry. This is for the simple reason that Steem connects the creators directly with the audiences, without the middlemen (producers) who often stumble in misunderstanding the demands of the audience.
Anecdotally, a vast majority of votes bought end being self-votes on mediocre (if not spam) posts, and they are paid out with no further attention. Large votes ($10+) are required to gain any significant visibility. (I'm aware of an initiative by Minnowbooster to offer quality authors larger votes, but that's yet another band-aid to a broken solution) Yes, there is of course many people who have become regular bloggers and used vote buying services, but do not confuse correlation with causation. I have personally asked many good authors to stop vote buying, so that I could submit their posts to Curie, or vote for them myself instead. They did. Through this they got a kickstart and built and audience through the network effect. It would be disingenuous to suggest that said author was discovered due to vote buying.
Vote buying services make Steem look scammy, and those buying have a high attrition rate. If a content creator has to pay to reward themselves, it is obviously an unsustainable endeavour with no long term scope. Also, in a previous post that generated a lot of comments, I noticed almost all of my favourite bloggers who commented would never buy votes. I mean, which artist who respects their own work would?
That said, vote buying services can be a lucrative service to offer. Authors will come and go, but someone or the other will want to buy votes. And that is just fine - any claims to there being a sustained demand for such a service is true and valid. What is not, however, is that it offers a valuable long term service to the network.
With Communities incoming, content discoverability will be greatly improved.
Finally, if the problem is "new users have a hard time getting noticed", it is one that has had a clear and established solution that has worked wonderfully for over a year now.
Curation. There is a significant financial incentive to find and vote undiscovered posts. I have made a lot of money by discovering exceptional posts that are sitting at $0, resteeming them or otherwise getting the word out about them, and then being paid for it through curation rewards (or finder's fee, in case of Curie, which is an indirect return of curation rewards). I vote for them purely on merit. No need to be greedy and ask people to pay for it on top of it.
If you really care about the Steem community, stop with this vote buying, and use your software engineering talent to build curation initiatives. It can be just you, it can be a group of people. Approach whales to delegate (or follow) their unused SP. Make deals with them so you can send them (or they send you, in case of following) a percentage of your curation rewards. Build sophisticated machine learning bots and content discovery systems. Prioritise making a free market that rewards long term quality and not short term greed.
If you want to make a quick buck, that's just fine, vote buying will continue to have some demand.
PS: I'll support anyone that downvotes posts and votes by vote buying services, as that effectively redistributes the reward pool to the people that create and discover content on merit. The people that add lasting value to Steem, making it a quality social publishing platform.