That's kind of irrelevant to whether people linking to blog posts or discussions should be banned.
Nowhere did I suggest that people should be banned. I suggested to make links unclickable or at least moderate them as any other ref links, given that the author has a direct financial incentive to get people to visit his/her blog and sign up for the website.
Poor phrasing on my part. I didn't mean to suggest there was a call for banning the people, only the practice of linking.
I don't see a good reason to make links unclickable unless they have a high risk of leading to malware. This doesn't qualify.
Unless it is an actual steemit ref link (?r=referrer) the linker derives no direct financial benefit if someone clicks through and then signs up. If someone clicks through, signs up, goes back to the very same page, and then upvotes the post, well author of the blog post
might make a penny (or quite possibly literally zero), since new signups have negligible voting power.
These links are not an attempt to gain a direct financial benefit, or if they are the person doing it is clueless about how the system actually works.