I'm not a fan of the delegation function myself.
When I first joined, the idea of site as it was presented to me was that you would buy more STEEM to gain more influence.
This created a demand for STEEM and gave an incentive to power it up.
With delegation, however, what's the point of buying STEEM with your money when you can just accomplish the same thing by brown nosing the right people for delegation?
You mention that apps and projects such as dLive, dTube, etc. require delegation in order to function, but in the real world, you always invest and take a risk with your money in order to start something.
People save money, or go to a bank to take out a loan.
This risk motivates them to work hard in order to make a profit. Whenever you don't have skin in the game in capitalism, you don't work as hard as you can. This is a fact.
And with delegation, it's someone else's skin in the game, which is probably why none of these apps have really fulfilled their potential.
This is not to say there aren't good guys who have been delegated to, and who use their delegation responsibly because there actually are. But again: what's the incentive for these people to buy STEEM when they get all the benefits for free?
And why should we support a function that specifically disincentivizes the purchase of STEEM Power?
People can debate me.
But they don't. There were other methods for funding the projects - such as showing real development and improvements and receiving upvotes and donations. There is also the beneficiary option, where interface operators could charge a percentage of post rewards. The delegation to these projects is strictly for voting content in order to get people to use those interfaces. Without the chance of getting those upvotes from the delegated accounts, the interfaces wouldn't be used - which means that they aren't that appealing in the first place and probably shouldn't be receiving the delegations that mostly enrich the project developers without needing to deliver on promises.
Yep. There's no need to do anything when 1) it's not you assuming most of the financial risk and 2) you're receiving the rewards.
I would much rather see real developers create something actually wanted or actually useful/functional and aesthetically pleasing rather than see hideous, clunky, barely-functional interfaces mopping up rewards on the platform because STINC has diluted all other investor influence by delegating millions of SP to many different projects. And they don't appear to be slowing down.
So, crowd out actual buyers and holders of the token in favor of those who made no investments and don't deliver on anything other than the most basic of barely-functional interfaces. This is the current model for the platform's economic incentives. And we wonder why the place has become anti-social, why content discovery is so poor, and why the price only moves when Koreans are speculating or when the general crypto markets are moving.