Congratulations! This comment received a 100.00 % upvote from @liveyourdream, an actual human being who appreciates other people creating valuable content and actually reads it instead of using bots or voting trails^^
Okay, so you say the ecosystem will be drained with bots doing all the valuable upvotes which sounds legit of course but what I don't understand is that since the value of Steem decreased, the reward pool itself raised according to steem.supply.
That's a phenomenon which on the other side also sounds plausible again and which we have seen in the past already according to less activity within the community. Do you have an idea how this is working?
In general I share your fears and doubts about the long term development of this platform like the imbalance of power, whales creating trash and upvoting themselves, etc.
And these are exactly the reasons why I lost a lot of trust in this platform within the last few weeks. Of course, there are some "good whales" who try to accumulate as much people as possible to fight against this abuse but it's like you already said.
As a minnow with almost no influence how can we stop them? We would use all of our voting power only trying to stop this abuse. Which would mean again no rewards for us. I have better things to do with my free time than this...
I will read through your article probably tommorow as I have to get ready for a trip. Thanks for your in depth reaction! :)
I don't have enough experience on this platform to give you an answer as to why the "reward pool" is up and to be completely honest, I don't even know what the reward pool is. I have never heard of it because I didn't come here for the money. I came here "blind" because I invest in crypto by reading white papers, playing with prototypes, betas and researching the team. I wanted to use this platform first hand. I actually paid to create my account because when I attempted to create an account the registration was buggy. This should have been my wake up call that the team is sub-par and that the platform is not what it seems. By "blind," I wanted to experience this platform like a new user would. Why? Because if a new user has a piss poor experience, the project will not see enough the traction necessary for mainstream adoption. In its current state its just not possible.
If I were heavily invested in STEEM I would be concerned with the teams inability the execute and grow organically. When I look at investments, I view them like a venture capitalist would.... for lack of a better analogy. Due diligence would reveal all the flaws of this platform. Right now, its a shitcoin with a front end that is essentially hiding the scam if you understanding what I am saying.
By enabling voting bots and whale abuse this platform is entering the point of no return. I am not sure minnows can do anything. This platform isn't designed for minnows to gain influence organically. There's nothing organic about this platform. Read my comments on other post and you will see where I am coming from.
Trust is earned, not given. For me, this team has a lot of work to do to earn my trust.
Sorry to rant. Nobody is seeing this besides you.