I have just gone through every member of the VOTU community discord server to find and compare the curation charts of all those who have received at least 10 Mega vest in delegated SP. Though the identities of some of the better curators might be a little obvious, I do not wish to name any of the curators that might be considered selfish. I do not see the benefit in witch hunts, and I do not judge these people for voting this way if they paid for the delegation. It is up to the stakeholder delegating to decide if these are the right people to delegate to.

5 out of these 6 delegations (3 above 3 below) were free

One of these gets their delegation for free and the other pays for their delegation.

Same again with one being a little more colourful than the other this time.

Which one do you think paid for their delegation?

Which one got theirs for free?

Which one retains more users on the platform?

Delegators

I'd like the attention of @freedom @blocktrades @smooth @minnowbooster and any other stakeholders known for selling delegation.

Today I received 2 messages regarding 2 different accounts offering upvotes at a price of SBD or STEEM. This is a growing industry on the network and I think we need to consider what effect it is having and how we can turn that around.

Firstly, I do not blame any person who comes to steemit, looks at the few ways that people are making money here, and chooses to set up an upvote selling bot. If this is what we allow to make money, this is what people will continue to come to make money.
Secondly, we are in the early stages of a social network. Facebook started giving priority to business pages and advertising after they dominated the internet. Instagram also did not become the corporate product promoting platform it did until it had taken over the screens of the millenial generation. YouTube took a decade before they began forcing ads on almost all YouTube videos. The reason for this is there is a risk of losing the social networks most valuable asset - the users - if they haven't reached internet dominating territories. (This is a late night post so dont mind the bad attempts to grasp for words)
Finally, the people above and below, curating content for you manually, engaging with people, spreading their votes far and wide (but also carefully) are doing an important service for you. I don't want to make any demands, but I assure you people want to do this work for you, and not only do they deserve to get paid for it (via curation rewards) but they would do a much better job of it in order to try to keep those coming in.

Upvote buyers and delegation buyers who then go on to sell upvotes have zero incentive to maintain the value of this network.

But we the stake holders can give them the incentives.

A large stake holder of SP can do many things with their SP.

1. They can curate manually earning curation rewards and rewarding valuable users for their contributions, encouraging them to keep going.
2. They can set up automated voting, which is somewhat less encouraging as the rewards are there regardless of how much work was put in.
3. They can delegate their power to 10 different people, so that they can work less, and the people who later become investors are kept 10 times more engaged with all the comments and valuable contributions by the active members of the community.

Free delegation is a game changer

Remember that the more people getting not just rewarded, but engaged with and interacted with, the more people are satisfied to keep going and one stake holder only has 2 eyes as well as a life and family to attend to. Every stake holder here who is not powering down has the power to employ 10 people to do their curation 10 times as well as they could have on their own. And it is you the stake holders who benefit from this engagement and that's WITHOUT the payment of SBD and STEEM.

Recently @stellabelle and @fulltimegeek generously delegated their SP out to reputable curators of the platform. You only have to look at the charts to know they are actively voting for many content creators and commenters and they were carefully selected. I want to ask all the stake holders selling delegation to reconsider. Are we not in this together? Everybody has a role here and we all have a means to reward each other for fulfilling our part in growing this network. The content creators who create the content that keeps people engaged. The curators who decide on the content that should be encouraged and retain the best content creators with their upvotes. And finally the investors......wait, who? Oh yeah,

That's us!

Hi there, nice to meet you. I know you've been wondering where are all the investors well

HI WE'RE RIGHT HERE.

Yep that's us. Look back at all the bull markets we had. Who was investing?? They were the users that were kept here getting rewarded for their contributions. People like @exyle , @craig-grant , @demotruk , even me (before a bad emotional trade). If you're looking for investors you've got to stop sending us away with systems that discourage us from working and start trusting us to build this network for you! Come on, we know you didn't come here to build a social network! But we did. So trust us to build this network with the use of your delegation power, so that everybody's voice is worth a little bit more and the best, most hard working curators get the best chance at growing here.

I promise you 10 people are a million times better than one bot.

Join us on discord