Too many people are paid to look away in an economy dependent on attention.

Damn. I love that statement. Might steal in future.

There's no way anyone can convince me personally that these services are somehow beneficial.

Me neither, unless they are viewed as the neutral and inevitable outgrowth of a digital system: or as helpful indicators of underlying code being inherently flawed--or as a sign an enormous cultural uprising would be necessary to manually counter said services (which, I fear, given the nature of most modern humans is extremely unlikely to occur save some super-wealthy good-actor acquiring a massive stake)

I see content creators work, publish a post, walk away. They sell their votes. That means someone uses that content creators own SP against them. Their post gets buried under the paid promotions, and they've effectively sabotaged their own business and potential profits. This place quite literally has it's head screwed on backwards.

Good insights. Things are rather dysfunctional here at present. I'm most interested to see what happens when the bull market returns to crypto and STEEM. I believe most will stop talking about any issues because of the massive amounts of money they're making. The bear market's been interesting because people are emotionally distraught and more willing to be genuine because of that. Suffering brings a strange sort of lucidity to life.