RE: The Dangers of "Pay to Play", and a Possible Solution. (Also My Thoughts on Steemit Behavior)
You are on the right track but you stopped following the trail of money too soon. The vote sellers don't actually make much. That may come as a surprise to you when you see the incoming payments and curation rewards. However, the vote selling services RENT the Steem Power they use to upvote. They rent it from some of the largest whales on platform, who delegate their SP to the vote sellers in return for weekly payments. These whales receive the vast majority of all profits from selling votes. Without specific numbers, the basic idea is: vote buyers (can) make a small profit (can - if using an ethical vote selling service. If using a bid bot, users can actually lose money); vote sellers make a slightly large profit per vote; the whales who delegate the SP take most of the cut.
@freedom is one of the biggest whales selling delegations to vote sellers - just look at the wallet transaction history if you want your jaw to drop to the floor.
All the issues you bring up are of course real issues and problems with vote selling. They just aren't the biggest problem. Vote selling serves to increase the single biggest problem facing Steem, which is the incredible wealth inequality. The biggest whales already control a staggering amount of the total STEEM out there, and the % they control is growing fast because of the rise of vote selling. This is a real long term danger to the platform. It scares off other large institutional investors to see the STEEM concentrated in the wallets of so few. On top of that, these whales are already proving that they are willing to grab the short term profit - they are obviously not in it for the long haul, or they would be trying to grow their investment by increasing the value of Steem blockchain. They will bail and dump their Steem on the market, and when the price of Steem crashes can anyone claim that they really benefited by buying votes? If you grow your account by some small amount of Steem and SBD by buying votes, but you contribute to the ultimate downfall of the platform and your Steem becomes literally worthless, have you made a wise choice?
I actually did see that, and I 100% agree with you. My problem with this post and most all of my posts is I just seem to run out of time. It would have taken me two weeks to compile the post I really would have liked to create, and since I have such few eyes on me I decided to just put out an abbreviated version of it. I probably should have mentioned the SP renters/loaners in with the bot owners, as they would be getting the main stake of the profits. In my mind I grouped them together, but the reader probably wouldn't see that. So thank you for pointing it out here.
My whole point is I'm hoping that enough people will start to see that they are not providing a valuable community service but in fact devaluing the platform when these services are being used in such high numbers. As concerning the vast wealth up at the top, it's not something I would know how to remedy as the same situation has occurred in the real world. Lets hope that some of them decide that perhaps for the value of their own investment they should slowly begin to sell some of it, or at least delegate some to services that help benefit the "value" and appeal of the platform, For doing so would further increase their own wealth in the future. But I'm just a poor man giving my two cents.
Thank you for reading my post and adding value to the comments. If your interested, I did a bit of a follow up post to this one... It's more of a satire based one... perhaps a bit on the profane end of the spectrum. As I was trying to recreate that sick feeling we all get when we see a massive paid out trending post that turns out to be pure bs. Have a lovely day.