> 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.

@donkeypong This resonates hugely with me.  And honestly, In my humble opinion, nothing compares with GOOD curation by the community. The reality of selling votes is that it has zero effect on rewarding good content.  Anyone who can pay, can get a vote...and so many people do it, that it raises the water level of what it takes to "get noticed" anyway.  

> And in the end, I don't know what effect all of this has on the content, but as long as people are engaged and participating and attracting others, then we'll see where it goes.

I totally appreciate your honesty here. The most salient question for me is what type of Steemit Ecosystem sets us up for becoming Respected, Desired, and Notable in the 'real world'.  If our ecosystem is flooded with cheap, transitive, and barely above spamming quality interactions and posts, that is super obvious to people.  

If we can influence the system to heavily encourage QUALITY over MANIPULATION, that is also super obvious to anyone looking in.  I want a Steemit that when a totally random person comes across online, they're like, **HOLY FUCK**, those people are doing something amazing.  

Appearances are everything.  Currently I think many people look at the site, and it looks somewhat akin to a freaky cult built around sucking up to each other.  

Anyway, I'm really glad you're discussing the subject, I believe it to be of utmost importance to the future of the platform.

Also I totally agree with you here....

> We need to reward people (at an appropriate level) for short form posts, links, memes, photos, videos, music, comments, and other activities and participation, not just long writing. Hopefully, we find those organically.

And might like to add, that ultimately finding ways to reward people that encourages them to offer wild, insightful, and very honest, or at least creative interactions is going to be key.  I think the KIND of interactions people offer is huge...and for new folks seeing massive amounts of bot spam all over the place seems like a pretty clear detriment to all of us.