Yeah, the idea that selling your vote is the worst thing in the world is an attitude rooted in the ideal that people should be forced to allocate inflation in a certain way.
If you want a say in how allocation is distributed... stake more coins. Plain and simple.
If your only regard is for your personal stake, you may not be wrong. If you're intent on Steem being successful, you're very wrong. We're sliding in marketcap for reasons, and one of them is that code encourages extracting rewards instead of encouraging creating good content and attracting more people to Steem, which would build value in the investment vehicle.
We have a terrible retention rate, ~7.5% IIRC, and these two metrics are joined at the hip by the profiteering model the code encourages, and both would be mitigated, if not reversed, by creating proper incentives for stake to imbue the underlying vehicle with more value via development and using rewards as the marketing tool it was intended to be.
If you want people to come to Steem, stop extracting the rewards that might bring them here. The code enabling rewards to be extracted by profiteers is why they aren't coming much, don't stay if they do, and the value of Steem continues to drop in a competitive market.
I'm not moralizing about ebil votesellers. I don't care. I do care about Steem, and came here because Steem has potential to protect free speech in a world that is increasingly dominated by delusional censors incapable of facing reality. That matters a lot. If Steem fails, I don't know what might step up to that plate.
Good code can encourage development and grow the value of Steem. We see that Steem has dropped ~30 places in two years. That's not a fad. It's not a temporary wiggle. It's a long term trend, and a prophecy. Bad code needs fixing, and voteselling is what it needs to fix, or we're gonna watch Steem keep on dropping until it doesn't matter anymore.
With all due respect, I disagree. Vote selling brings value to Steem; it doesn't take it away.
Where supply meets demand, markets and liquidity are created, no matter what. Fighting against vote selling directly is extremely counter productive.
Why is there demand to buy votes? Because the frontends greatly reward payout value in the form of curation (visibility, not Steem rewards). Anyone who wants to fight against vote selling needs to attack the incentive to buy votes at the source.
Anyone can create a frontend, which means anyone can change the visibility granted to posts in an innovative way that solves the problem. The solution is permissionless, which means anyone who is attempting to fix the problem with a hard fork is simply trying to funnel inflation into their own pockets using covert propaganda.
voteselling is NOT curation. It is contrary to curation. It's profiteering that extracts operating funds intended to encourage good content that markets Steem.
That kills the Steem.
The issue I am raising is not about advertising at all. It's about incentives to imbue the investment vehicle with value, or to strip value from the vehicle. The vehicle is Steem, and financial profiteering is like selling the machine tools on a factory floor to profit the owners of the stock. It strips the ability of the investment vehicle to increase in value, and declines capital gains in favor of profiteering.
That's what voteselling does.