So, I agree with you on all of it, but think the conclusion of the rewards curve, in terms of your metaphor is:
Your customers at Scarves and Stuff have a dollar to spend in your store. You're not a big store, but you sell a few scarves every day, a fifty or sixty bucks or so. Enough to make it seem worthwhile to stay open and hope to expand.
In this mall is also a Target. Obviously lots of people go to the Target, and they make a lot of cash. You think it's a nice thing that there's a Target here, because the people who come for the Target also stop by your shop on occasion.
But now there's a change coming to the mall. They think the problem with the mall is all those bouncy ball and candy machines which are also considered shops, albeit automated ones. They're always breaking and spilling things. There's some clown who comes in and jams them all full of quarters and then empties them of quarters immediately and it's gross and weird and people have been avoiding the parts of the mall where they are.
And so, the people who are in charge of the mall are going to do three things. One, they're going to start paying people to come to the mall. Yay, I guess.
Two, they're going to give the security guards tasers to try to stop those weird quarter stuffers. Yay, I guess.
Three, they're going to take a half of the money from the shops that make less than a hundred dollars a day and give it to the shops that make more than a hundred dollars a day.
This will make it harder for new candy machines and quarter stuffers to play their weird game in out-of-the-way nooks and crevices.
But the unintended consequence is that your established small business will be susceptible to the same machinations of the blockchain, I mean mall. You don't make $100 a day. Maybe on a particularly good day, but those are infrequent. And moreover, when you yourself go shopping in the mall, you like to visit the other small shops. Now when you're "buying" something from one of them, a big part of it goes to Target, and worse than that, the "getting paid to be a customer" part of that goes to Target's customers, not back to you. So you start to feel like you have to shop at Target, and like you're no longer breaking even at your shop.
This is what I think the rewards curve looks like.
Well, I do remember saying I've wanted to expand for quite awhile.
Some people are really going to need to step up their game. I'd like to see it attract the best of the best.
You'll have to wait and see how that reward curve and everything else together functions. There's a lot of misinformation floating around.
And just let me put it this way. If they can't find that sweet spot, so people can change their spending habits and support their favorites on a budget, they place loses out on a lot of money. Look at the bigger picture. People won't be acting the way they do today, after the changes. Piling on posts only means you get LESS rewards unless you time it perfectly. If everything goes full auto mode to the same people every time, regardless of content, that will be sitting there right in front of us every day. There's no hiding it, and people will downvote. And people will have to get used to that. Youtube videos receive thousands of downvotes. Too much of that and the demonitize police come knocking.
If some content producers attracted thousands of paying voters, they wouldn't need the votes of existing members. Also, why would anyone downvote that? If someone was responsible for a crowd of purchasing 2.5 million Steem, we ALL earn money.
We can't focus on giving everyone an equal share or something like that. We need more money potentially coming in than what the content producer could potentially sell. Get to that point and we don't even need to post to earn.
Also, with these new tribes and communites forming, you need to realize I made about $40 here before deductions and about $17 after deductions placing this work in the other two tribes.
So much is changing, it's hard to keep up. Some of my posts have made more on Palnet than they did on Steemit lately.
Do you have any tokens staked on Steem Engine?