RE: Turning Rage Into The Soothing STEEM Now Blowing Out My BUTT as I Mince My Words for You, The Reader of This
Well, thank you for pointing it out. I'm in agreement with what you said, and thought I would share my own experience so far. Thus my response.
I've witnessed bot owners pound anyone who wanted more clarity about what was going on with bots, mostly because they disagreed with any idea that might hurt business, although they would blame the method being used or call into question the integrity or intentions of the person trying to shed light on the matter.
A simple PAID by the reward amount on posts would be sufficient to signal that the rewards were paid for. I'd even take a net amount rather than the whole amount. It doesn't have to be anything big, but as is, it's deceptive, and most people are going to be squeezed out of the market anyway, as you said, because how many users have hundreds of STEEM or SBD to ensure they're even seen?
If people want advertising or promotion, there are definitely better means. I for one, would rather just have my posts get in front of followers and whoever else might be looking for that kind of content and cut out the middleman completely. I find that to be one of the biggest allures of the STEEM social media platform.
One of the main reasons why I signed up the moment I heard about this place was because of the fact there's no middleman. People like me, digital artists; if I was produce an image, then sell it as a poster in a retail environment, I'd get the smallest cut per unit, and it would be tiny. I explored other avenues, they all sucked, came here, got noticed, proved there's a demand, used simply being friendly and funny as my marketing... boom. I blew up. Enter the middleman, everything goes to shit.
Yeah, so I played middleman as an owner of two small weekly newspapers for roughly 15 years. In our case, our markets were so small and businesses so few that the ones that actually did advertise looked on it as a form of goodwill, rather than anything they might get from it. I'm afraid they were right, given our demographics: small bedroom communities with people working, and thus largely shopping, elsewhere.
I also got a degree a couple of years go in Social Media Marketing. If companies are smart, they'll do that in house and use social media to drive all aspects of their business, from customer service to product development crowdsourcing. But they don't. At any rate, people are less inclined to look at a static ad and go, "Dude, I've got to have that!" than they are to watch an influencer on YouTube unbox and test drive/review whatever it is.
If Amazon, not that they need to blow up any further, truly wanted to blow up further, to the point of domination of the entire galaxy, all they really need to do is add a social component to their site (not just one way reviews and testimonials), and it would become virtually unstoppable. They've got the consumers. They've got the authors and other creators/companies selling their wares. Let them talk to one another.
On STEEM. :)
Now just imagine how that business model would fall apart if they were buying positive reviews and votes out in the open like they do here. BOOM! Kiss those billions goodbye.