RE: I Don't Want to be a Sellout and a Few Other Things I Find Somewhat Humorous About This Place
I don't expect any changes. Just more of the same.
I'm aware of what's ahead. Soon enough there won't be a trending page that functions in this manner. These promoters and those who promote won't have much of a market. Nobody will go to the advertisement community just to watch these folks boost their posts and be congratulated by people who think the authors are successful.
I'm to the point now where, rather than flagging, I'd prefer to find ways where we all work together, instead of against each other. The best content producer here, whoever that is, loses visibility the moment the worst blogger buys a vote. That's ridiculous.
The worst blogger can put their ad on the best bloggers post. The logic behind the banner link functioning as the vote button is simple: If one clicks the banner, the content producer who hosted the ad loses a vote because the member who clicked the banner has now traveled away from the content producers material, and chances are the one who clicked the banner won't travel back to drop a vote down. If we add ads that don't function in that manner, we create another headache where we're working against each other instead of with each other.
I hear ya, I do like the idea of coming up with creative solutions that are positive instead of punitive.
We don't even have to force these folks to take a hit by pushing them aside to the promoted tab. Create a new section for the promoted posts, call it the MARKET. People love shopping, right?
Steemit is much like a giant magazine, and people buy pages to promote their products in magazines. A real magazine turns that process into a money making machine. People don't buy the magazine for the ads, they buy it for the content. Steemit, as a magazine, is not benefiting from the current internal marketing strategies of placing the ADS on the COVER of the magazine. The content needs to POP, and the ads are just there, and those ads help pay everyone who's producing content, plus those marketing their products get eyes on whatever they want to sell or say. This is incredibly basic stuff, and somehow the concept is flying under the radar here. So there's no need to complain, we have the right ingredients, now we just have figure out the recipe.