Lately, I've been trying to read more on the concerns a lot of people have aired as regards vote buying services and I've realized there's a common ground; it takes money away from people and could be used to promote spam or mediocre content.
When you read some of these arguments against vote buying, you're easily tempted to join the camp as all that is painted for you is doom and gloom but it's always a safe bet to view both sides of the coin before making decisions.
Whatever the origins of these services might have been, it is clear they meet some type of needs in the community and this is why they're being used in the first place. Now agreed there are flaws and all because come on, no system is perfect, do we then throw the baby out with the bath water?
The Big Issue
The fact is, people tend to leave when rewards aren't forthcoming. When you come for the rewards and decide to stay for the community, could your staying be tied to the fact that the community began to reward you more or say there was some light at the end of the tunnel for you?
Services like Curie were created to combat something; people leaving due to low rewards. Yes it is said that they reward authors who have hitherto not been discovered by the community at large but the main issue at hand is that users leave when rewards aren't forthcoming. It's this reward Curie has attempted to dole out and has been doing a good job of it.
Now will everyone go down the Curie route? I absolutely doubt it.
Curation is a very noble cause and there's no reason why it can't be properly married to vote buying. The thing with curation is that the thousands of new accounts coming on board daily aren't being (or can't be) properly catered for by the select few with all the Steem Power.
Anyone who then goes out of their way to secure some Steem Power should be allowed to use it the way they want? I'm not super clear on that.
Something Broken
In my early days on Steemit, I came across the "promote" feature where I could pay any amount of SBD I wanted in order to get my post on the promoted page. I bet many of you either don't know this page exists or don't understand what exactly it exists for.
This is where to find it. On top of the social icons at the bottom of any post.
What I soon discovered was that using this promoted feature adds nothing to your potential payout and doesn't give you any added visibility anywhere. Why then does this feature exist? I have been unable to find a suitable answer to that question and I've also been unable to find posts complaining about that feature. Why is this the case?
The Case For Beta
The promoted feature was probably thought out to be great but turned out to be implemented very poorly. Or maybe it's a secret sauce for something yet to come. It's very easy to quickly run under the beta umbrella and claim that everything on here is still experimental. So well we can easily say that Steemit is still in beta and so it is probably an experimental feature. Agreed, but is Steemit the only entity allowed to experiment with features? I doubt that.
A Quick Trip Down Promoted Land
As at the time of writing, this is the first post on the promoted category and as you can see, a whooping $85 had been spent to promote it. With two days left till post payout, it has hardly even gotten half of that back as potential payout. Yet this is an official feature allowed to remain for so long.
Whereas if that amount had been spent on 
Some Quotes Found
Yup agreeable that vote buying services can be put to good use. We should be free to trade as long as there's mutual consent. It's just that it can equally be abused, affecting the network. So I guess vote service providers just have to make sure its a net positive for the platform. -
here
I would much rather see good content get curated and rewarded for its merits rather than votes being sold and rented to anyone, but everyone deserves a chance and not everyone has been getting it, absent those services. So they do fill a need. That probably results in some lower quality content, but I also feel that we need to move beyond the expectation of only long posts getting rewarded. -
here
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. -
here
We create content for our blog posts and if other's like the content, it's rewarded with votes. From my understanding, the better and original your content is, the more likely you're rewarded on a post. With the creation of these vote buying projects, does this cause content creators to really focus on creating original good content or does it create the mentality to post whatever they can and just buy upvotes? -
here
As you can see, I probably have way more questions than answers in this post and that's because I'm only just beginning to study this. I would love to read your opinions and answers to the questions below.
Do you think vote buying is evil and bad for Steem?
Should businesses even be allowed to be built on Steem?
Would it make any difference to marry vote buying with quality curation?
What do you think is a solution and the answer to retaining users?