Simply burn author rewards and your chances of getting downvotes fall dramatically. It is kind of annoying to hear the work of ocdb as "gang." OCDB is spending countless unpaid hours curating content and making sure paid votes don't offer ROI.
The real question is, did you want to buy votes to earn ROI, or did you want paid votes for the publicity? If you want the paid votes simply for publicity, then burn author rewards or send them to Steem.Dao.
We do need a clearer way for people to promote content, the promotion tab is hardly used. We need to blend the promoted tab with trending in a nonintrusive way, so everyone can easily promote post by burning Steem.