I get your point about the article saying "shareholders should be required to vote on share buybacks" -- but I think it may be a stretch to assume that's exactly what's going on here. I think the article is talking about a vote tally for a go / no-go decision, rather than individuals deciding if they'd like to contribute or not. Your point still stands though, that there's some level of democracy being played out, and nobody is being forced to do anything.

I would imagine it's generally the same individuals on an auto-vote setup, though, that are voting for these burn-posts -- rather than say, curators who have searched and searched for the day, but can't find any more decent content to spend their SP / VP on, so decide to vote for burn-posts instead. That said, I haven't looked or checked.

Anyhow -- I think the burn-posts probably aren't big enough to do anything anyways, so it's hardly worth talking about. It's more of an annoyance seeing it all the time.

Thanks for chatting. I like what you've got to say, more often than not, when I see you around.

EDIT:

I took a quick looksee at the users that are voting for burn-posts to see what's up. I was originally under the impression (for whatever stupid reason) that curation rewards for these burn-posts also get burned -- but that's apparently not the case.

Now, more than ever -- this strikes me as greasy.

Extracting curation rewards without distributing author rewards. High (and low, but probably mostly high) SP users getting rewarded for voting on literally nothing rather than encouraging new users by throwing them a bone.

If we wanted to avoid "market dumps" (though, I'm often amazed at how villified selling what you've "earned" is around here), maybe there should be some education campaigns, or token sinks (other than burning). Or maybe, if people are confident that steem will succeed, maybe individuals should just buy the tokens that users are dumping at such a low price, and be happy that they scooped up a deal. Isn't there a buyer for every sell transaction on the market?