The problem is that most of those groups are rolled into one, so really we're talking about people who have a lot of SP. SP dominates the conversation. Lots of devs are witnesses or whales, whales dominate the curating game, the leasing game, the bot game, and the author game because they can just vote for themselves and others in their groups.
And so where does that leave everyone else? Nothing they do or say really matters. No matter how reasonable the arguments from someone with 15 sp are, their voice will not get heard because it doesn't make a dent on the blockchain. And what does that result in? Piss-poor retention rates, as you mentioned.
Steemit is the illusion of a social media site placed on top of a coin. It masquerades around as a social media site, but anyone with a brain can look at any other social media site, toy around with it for a few moments, and understand why it's successful. They all occupy various niches and have different types of users, but there are commonalities to most. And steemit lacks most of the basic functionalities and ethos that have fostered the success of them, preventing its widespread adoption and use.
Limiting the amount of times you can vote a day is anti-fun. Not being able to post for half the day is anti-fun. Your vote not mattering at all is anti-fun. Having to navigate a complex mathematical world of min-maxing is anti-fun for most people. Many people do not want their social media platform to reward them monetarily, at least not at the expense of the user experience. People don't like ads, so why would they like a website where no content or post isn't essentially someone advertising something, if not themselves and their own brand and image. People hate insincerity, humble-bragging, virtue-signaling, the restriction of free speech, and being able to be yourself, and feeling like they're being judged with every word they say, so why would they subject themselves to that in their free time?
Whales here are content to sit on their hundreds of thousands or even millions and earn a gradual return, knowing that as long as speculators can overvalue coins whose worth are dependent on a userbase ~50,000 strong with paltry growth and non-existent loyalty or retention, they can at least still generate a decent return on investment if they keep shitposting and voting themselves to the top. They favor a steady trickle of income received from price valuations that are completely decoupled from the reality that is steemit. Steemit was dead on arrival. There is no hope for steemit in its current incarnation.
Why would they vote against their own interests, making the hard choices and leaps of faith necessary to give the platform a fighting chance, especially at a time when the coins are so overvalued? They won't, and it's sad to see. I only say this not because I have full faith and confidence in steemit or steem or its shareholders, but because the competition is so detestable that I would rather watch steemit become what it needs to be, than see facebook implement a killer coin, or watch any of the other giants begin to reward their users with digital funny money to keep them interested and engaged.
When steemit dies it will be known as that weird place with the users who subjected themselves to low-quality memeing about how great steemit is, the place where the power dynamic reflected that of a typical cult and whose value and impact on the world was minimal aside from getting a few people rich and wasting others' time in the hopeless pursuit of getting rich.
And that's a huge problem. Most content creators who are of worth do not do any of what they do for money. Money is just a necessity that funds a basic living. The greatest content creators want to be rewarded by having the largest impact on the biggest amount of people they can, they want to actually change the world and remind humans of their shared humanity and actually have an impact. Maybe there are exceptions to the rule, clearly there are enough sell-outs to prove me wrong, but those who care want to help ordinary people, not just be trivial entertainment for some group of digital royalty like some court jester.
But if they actually cared about any of this none, of these issues would even be an issue by the time I had arrived upon this website, so I'm guessing it's all a moot point by now. And stop using the excuse "the onboarding process takes too long" guys, it's really lame and it's not convincing anybody. New people leave because there's literally no incentive for a sane person or a non-starving person to stay. And that's exactly why the membership is skewed as it is, between the haves and the have-so-little-that-it's-barely-worth-its.
You have expressed your dissatisfaction very clearly. Now, what ideas do you have to improve the platform? I hope you will expend equal or greater effort in building up the platform by offering better ideas on how to improve it and not only tear it down with your words and make people feel that it is a lost cause. Thanks.
See my response to you below buddy. It's all right! I was just speaking in general. My ideas are in the very first comment at the top under the author's blog if you would like to ready my constructive suggestions at what needs to be focused on. Sorry if I have created more controversy. I thought I was just contributing to the conversation.
I apologize for using the term "only tearing it down". That was a bad way of putting it to someone who obviously still wants the best for Steem. I agree that regardless of what happens the principles will stand in one form or another, hopefully in some other more successful app on the Steem blockchain or maybe EOS.
It's a fair comment and you make a lot of good points.
There are people who could fit into multiple Stakeholder groups, but there are also people who might specialise in one group. I am asking for representation via these groupings because those who wear multiple hats can have a conflict of interest.
There are a couple of reasons why I powered down last year and you've touched on some of them. I see a lot of problems for the platform that people are ignoring or are in denial about, which means they are unlikely to be fixed. With the recent mania there is a lot of gorging at the trough going on and while I am happy for people to be making money in the short term I would rather see STEEM become so much more than what it is today. I'm just not convinced any more that it will ever realise it's full potential. To me it is in danger of going the way of Netspace once the mania dies off and a real competitor emerges.
Maybe at that point people will be willing to make the tough decisions, but maybe at that point it will be too late.
To most, money comes first before any visions of a better future for humanity (lol) so I don't doubt that their desire to make money now will hamper the platform's chance at competing when the going gets tough. I feel like a lot of discussions are simply distractions to peel everyone's attention from the real problems with the site, so perhaps they're cleverly keeping people engaged in those discussions by design.
Yeah, without a high price for the coins I don't see what value people will see in the platform, and if we are to consider the very real possibility of a long-term cyclical bear market for crypto then this site is deader than dead once that happens, and that's discounting the fact that other companies are going to absolutely crush the possibility for steemit to be a dominant social media force.
Fiat or metal in the hand feels a lot better than digital bags or non-existant bags, and I feel like this site has been creating more than a few micro-bag-holders of late.
@baah—I believe @charitybot was talking specifically about Steemit dying, not necessarily STEEM, although I would add that Steem could by extension die because of the very idea you speak of. If people lose faith that their voice can be heard on Steemit to the audiences they wish to reach, then fewer will come and more will leave.
There is censorship on Steemit. It's called flagging/downvoting. If you want to, and have the power to do so, you can flag someone's post or comment to the point where it's no longer visible for the low ratings it received. Unfortunately, too much flagging here involves retaliation, not curation. There are people here who don't take kindly to even a different opinion, let alone being called out for their five second post that may or may not have value.
I do agree with you that of all the crypto coins I currently know of, STEEM has the greatest chance of holding on the longest because of Steemit. But I also agree with @charitybot that as Steemit is currently set up, it is not a social media platform—yet. And the glimmer of hope I read from your post @charitybot, is that with enough voices like yours finally being heard, and people actually acting upon the words, from the ground up, that Steemit can be molded into what it's been sold to be, but really isn't, and may never be unless we, the people, will it, and act accordingly.
Yes, we need to raise our voices and be heard but we need to offer more ideas and support and less complaining, tearing down and fomenting ill will and making people lose hope.
I wasn't speaking for myself alone. I do take responsibility for my emotions and constantly work to keep them in check. I will continue to use and believe in the platform. I am talking about the majority of humans that are subject to having human emotions and basing their decisions largely on how they feel about things, especially when it is something new to them and they are deciding if it is worth getting involved with. If they come on the platform and see a bunch of people fighting most will just turn away. If they see people suggesting ideas that will improve things, they will naturally want to get involved and bring their own ideas with them.
I didn't mean to offend you. Let's sing Kumbaya, let's chill, let's be positive and not let negative emotions affect either of us. Enjoy an upvote because I really do agree with the intent of your comment.
Countless good ideas have been suggested in the past, but like I said in my original post they will never be aired on a larger scale because it is not in the interests of the various stakeholders to make the necessary changes for allowing steemit to actually grow and be used by ordinary people.
Hard censorship comes in the form of flags, soft censorship comes in the form of any post by those not in various inner circles getting any attention at all. The majority of the userbase faces soft censorship on a daily basis, they post and their words are like farts in the wind, doomed to collect at most a few cents and a few pageviews.
Ordinary users don't sift through new, as it's unprofitable to curate most of those posts, let alone investigate the blockchain itself to find content.