I am struck by the fact that this dilemma is caused by the underlying monetization by whales of social interactions of ordinary folks. Presently this causes EIP to create the returns wasteland below ~$20, which seems to be the threshold whales find nominal to financially encourage extracting rewards by using the weight of their stake. It's why you need to use purchased votes in order to get a nominal financial return, and why user retention is dismal.
Most folks don't have substantial stake, and don't get curated by whales manipulating the rewards algorithms to extract the pool to their wallets, so have no financial incentive to be here. This may be the worst financial algorithm Steem has suffered since it's inception in that regard, as you point out.
Social media is THE most profitable business model in the world today, as the FAANGs prove. Steem is doing it wrong, despite most of the code being intended to do it right, because the ninjaminers personally seek to get rich and were not seasoned investors when they wrote the code. That ninjamined stake is a golden parachute they will ride away on when investors buy it, and they appear to no longer care what happens to Steem thereafter.
This is actually the most charitable view I can take of the situation, and it would be easy to claim that the aspects of the code that potentiate Steem to serve as a basis for volutarist government were little more than a fraudulent ruse to attract rubes that would buy the ninjamine and fill those golden parachutes. I am not actually confident so little ethical purpose actually underlies Steem, but the ninjamine sure makes it look that way.
Sadly for you, and your initial interest in Steem, profiteering from stake weighting is the underlying problem that prevents Steem from growing a market that enable the token price to rise. Steem has a vast potential market of folks that see the truth that centralized social media platforms exclusively profit from their posts and comments, want to speak freely, and that can see the value of discussion of issues and policies on a decentralized platform that inherently enables projects to be funded. Were their posts actually organically valued by virtue of their merit by their peers the user base would be growing virally, and the rising price of Steem would provide far better ROI to investors were they content with capital gains as the mechanism for their profits.
The extraction of those rewards incessantly by profiteers discourages them, and the dust threshold prevents newbs from getting rewards at all almost ubiquitously while preventing capital gains.
Separating the functional aspects of Steem would be a reasonable compromise, but that would reduce the ROI of the ninjaminers, and will not happen. Profiteering could be eliminated almost completely via the Huey Long algorithm, but that will not happen for the same reason. Were you able to build audience via your posts, and develop a market through Steem for income from your sports related mechanisms separately from your author rewards, that might make it worth your while to have enough Steem to blog and upvote your followers, but the rewards curve and dust limit make that impossible, and the vote buying solution that has arisen is now being destroyed by flaggots.
It's sad, but it is apparent that the ninjaminers are so focused on their own ROI that they are killing the goose that lays golden eggs. It's happening more slowly than I predicted would result from HF21, but as long as the user base continues to decline, it's happening all the same. I am only consoled by the fact that no one at all cares about my disappointment, and it only has meaning to me. I wish I could help, but all I can do is acknowledge that you are left without good options regarding Steem.
A couple dozen whales can't curate at scale, and are unwilling to decline to maximize their ROI nominally to allow the potential community to do it for them. The slope continues to get more slippery with every Hard Fork, and we are left feeling like we should have been liquored up, lubricated, and loved before getting forked so hard.
100% agree
The thing that really grates on my last nerve about this situation is that the whale's ROI is improving - in Steem. It's crashing in dollars or other currencies because they're crashing the price of Steem. If they'd back off the rapine and focus on growing the social media as strongly as possible, they'd get a rapidly rising token price resulting from viral social media growth, and they'd make a lot more real money when they cash out. They're stuck pulling tokens off of exchanges presently to try to keep the price from crashing now or at least that's how it looks based on the Poloniex delisting.
They're making lunch money and losing lambo money.
Lmao last line
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Well, I feel I should be loved and lubricated every night, but usually I just get so liquored up I can't even manage a soft fork with any dignity.
Here is some !BEER to start the evening :)
LOL fair do!
View or trade
BEER.BEERfor you. Enjoy it! Hey @valued-customer, here is a little bit ofWell said, sir!
Liquor, lubricants and a few choice words before each hard forking would be much appreciated.
I have to restrain myself from issuing comments full of choice words after HF21, or seeing serial flagging like it seems to be designed to encourage.