Don't agree with the "witch-hunting" name calling ;)

Promoting is fine. But the amount of the reward pool used for doing so still matters. People can find ways and places to do so that don't engender opposition from people such as myself who understand the systemic problems which can be caused by too much promotion.

Trending is a scarce resource. The posts cycle maybe every 12-24 hours in most cases, which means there are maybe 5-10 slots per day at most (depending on screen size and UI of the viewer, but obviously higher is better). People can take a step back and be a bit circumspect about whether their content is not only useful, but really one of the 5-10 most worthy of exposure on a given day out of every single post on the entire platform. I would submit in many cases the answer is no, especially if other stakehodlers don't agree with the merit enough to give organic votes.

Finally, too much promotion undermines what we are trying to do with encouraging people to invest in curatation initiatives. Not only does it reduce the reward pool (for both curators and authors) but it makes curation less effective and meaningful. Do you honestly believe that every one of those 5-10 daily slots should be filled by promotion, leaving none to be filled by honest curation? My second question would be how many posts would you say are currently being heavily promoted daily and is this a healthy balance? I don't think so, not yet. So some push-back is healthy.

So, no, I'm not flatly against promotion, in specific special cases where the promotion is exceptionally needed and useful, but it can easily be, and has been, drastically overused. Until that is no longer the case (or it becomes clear that EIP did not work and the dominance of paid voting and self-voting will remain the norm), I plan to continue applying some downvotes to encourage change.

#NewSteem on, mate!