RE: I'm Andrew. The guy who put together a steemit experiment that blew up in his face and costed him $570!
Re. buying upvotes, it doesn't matter if you buy them at a specific price. Steem can work only if people vote on other people's content because they think it's good and therefore likely to reward them indirectly if the content becomes popular. If you introduce a direct money reward for voting, people start having a vested interest saving their votes to upvote posts that give them some cash back at the expense of regular content. This creates a shortcut from voting to reward that doesn't involve finding and upvoting good content and threatens to undermine the curation mechanism. It also divests some of the daily content reward away from authors of valuable content to authors of paid-vote schemes that bring no added value to the community. The bottom line is that allowing paid votes risks undermining the whole system by reducing the incentive to produce good content and curate other people's content and therefore affect the overall quantity and quality of content on the network.
Stake holders who are familiar with the way things are working on Steem and economically rational know that allowing votes buying is a self-defeating proposition. Accordingly you can expect that there will always be consensus among stake holders to prevent vote buying and other forms of direct an indirect bribery. This is the reason why your post was downvoted very prompty after it drew the attention of larger stake holders.
I understand the instances where it does indeed divert funds from other content that add value to the network/community but that is also where I'd draw the line. In my instance it wasn't a pure sell of upvotes, I did bring value to the community by bringing a good handful of people from outside the community in, engaging those already inside, exposing people to the concepts of blockchains and bitcoin, testing the steem system, and in some ways forcing the discussion on limits and incentives.
If on the other hand I was purely buying upvotes, I get it. But I wasn't and I did it in the most responsible way that I could.
I know that recognizing/deciding whose bringing value to the community can be have quite the fine line that has some added subjectiveness to it but what I'm trying to show is that what I was doing wasn't a straight off wasteful drain on the system. Can you see where I'm coming from?
We had this conversation three times already, I'm not sure what more I can add. It doesn't matter how good your post or how helpful you are as a person: posts that contain any form of vote buying will be downvoted by stake holders because they are a threat to the model. It is pointless to make a post that will both buy votes and do something positive, it will be downvoted all the same because we just can't allow people to buy votes. In that case it's preferable to make two posts: the one with the added value content and/or where you explain your efforts to help building the community, and the one where you do another attempt at buying vote. That way we can flag and neutralize the second post without affecting the first one.
Hey Recursive, I made that comment right before talked :)
I told you I added a comment, I thought you saw it. I understand the point you are making.