RE: Buying Advertising and Promotion discussion
I'm not sure I fully understood your idea, but doesn't it come down to have two kinds of votes? Bought for "exposure" and human/organic for "value"? How to distinguish between those?
Yes, this is what I am wondering about it too but, this is the thing isn't it? It would have to be 'all agree'.
Even if all current bid-bots would agree to this system, it would not even take a day until new (off-chain/help-a-friend/community/...) market evolves, selling/organizing regular votes and we're back where we are now.
People can claim 'for exposure' and 'eyes on' but if this was actually implemented, they would change their behaviours and take them underground. Essentially, it invalidates their defence making for profit the only real reason left.
Did I miss something?
You missed nothing at all. Thank you.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I will be close to impossible to get all to agree as long as there is possible profit by doing it otherwise.
For "exposure-only" there's already the "promoted" feed, listing posts that burnt SBD via @null. So making users look into the promoted tab instead of hot or trending would already go into the direction you proposed, I guess?
Or, sliding promoted content through the promoted feature into trending for a price would work well as well. If promoted runs a bidding system (which I think it kind of does). Bid your way into the top spot and appear in trending in the first 5 posts. 2nd spot in the top 10 etc. (arbitrary numbers). It could have a feature that for lower amounts you could buy into a tag trending position.
This would take away the need for bidbots to get into trending and burn the SBD in @null
It wouldn't get rid of the bidbots but there would then be a clear separation of the motivations of why to promote the posts. Bidbot users would only have the claim of profit. I have no problem with people making profit but, be honest about it and don't hide behind the various masks claiming for engagement.