I think it is time for @ned to try once again delegating a little bit to content producers like he did a almost two years ago. I know he probably feels like some of that backfired on him, and a lot of accusations were flying, and a little bit of abuse going on with the delegations. I think a couple dozen delegations of 10,000SP, (a very minor drop in his bucket), to place and people that support steemit's social side, and to help onboard open eye's about Communities. I myself know of three or four accounts that would do well the delegation.
Steemworld is the most awesome tool out there for looking at and keeping updated on your account, and peeking at other accounts, I certainly do like it. I saw the oracle-d post and it does look very promising. Steempress I think has hit on a vast untapped market, that will certainly benefit steem in the long term.
I guess thieves are in every part of the world.
The 500k delegations to single person accounts were certainly eye-brow raising, and the stats from these accounts didn't look that great.
If delegations like this were to happen in the future, I would hope that 'watchers' were assigned to keep tabs, in the hope that the accounts with the delegation were using it 'properly'.
The artificial Whale creations did not work out to well for him, I think an artificial Dolphin creation could have better response, and be spread a bit wider. I look at people like you, paulag, tcpolymath, thedarkhorse, and davemccoy, what you all, and a few others are doing "Community Wise". 10,000SP would be a big help for all of you, and I know there are other people and projects out there that are trying to help new users, and small users out.
Maybe @ned will give it a try one of these days again, only this time with a few strings attached. He must see that retention rates need to be increased, and that there are people working either intentionally on retention, or having retention rates increased as a side benefit of what they are doing.
That would be a cool experiment. Create 50 dolphins and see how the community feel rises - I expect it would be a huge moral boost for many.
The strings could be a weekly report and some checkups by myself and others, to ensure the votes are not circular or on self. Fingers crossed, although I'm not holding my breath.
Not likely to happen, although the subject could be broached at the steemfest3 meetup, the steem blockchain is pretty firm, but steemit is changing and adapting to become a very real global meeting place. Stemit is decentralized and open enough that it is no longer just another American Product seeking global domination like facebook, google, apple, and microsoft. There are already multinational teams of people helping each other create.