Yes, the lock-in period is dumb, but as far as user-friendliness goes I think a small lock period is a good thing to save your funds in the case of an attack if we're using a centralized platform in the first place. I'd rather have it entrusted to someone who can field security experts and worry about that 24/7 over me or the average person's own security expertise. 13 weeks is obviously too long though, and it does scare investors away from locking anything in because of market fluctuations.
STEEM would probably have gone to 2 cents if not for the market injections and market-rigging of USDT/Bitfinex and other exchanges complicit in the act of pushing prices up.
Account-based voting done right is the only way to grow the network. That part is correct. No one wants to move onto a social media network where their vote is worth 1/1000000th of the next person over. There should not be a conflation of the ownership of a platform and the ability to have that privilege confer the power of taste-making on the platform. That is stupid, and akin to giving the biggest shareholders of fb, ig, twitter, etc. the only voting power for content on their respective networks. If that sounds dumb, well, that is exactly how dumb it played out here.
Unfortunately, if there is any real worth to any of what is being done on this blockchain, any good ideas will be pruned and copied onto the private networks of much more popular competitors. When we remove USDT and Upbit from the equation the past price has shown that serious investors are not really interested in STEEM or steemit at all, mostly because anyone with pockets that deep knows they can spin up a far superior network in short time and crush us. But the problem is that no one cares about anything like this. There is little real-world utility to giving people coins and running an inefficient blockchain to distribute rewards when most people are happy enough to get paid 0 just to view content they like and interact with people they know.
So yes, the rewards pool is actually a solution to a problem no one had with existing social media, because on other platforms votes are inherently equal and there is no need to run extra calculations to change the weight of them. Perhaps the only calculations that they do run are algorithms to push certain content to feeds, which are done very efficiently in an effort to strike a balance between showing users promoted content and content they think the end-user will enjoy.
Because we don't have a large userbase we don't need to worry about outside companies having any interest in "tapping into our giant userbase", so we don't have to worry about any of that either. We can just worry about ourselves now. By trying to make this platform attractive to investors from the start, we have failed to make the platform attractive to either regular users of social media or large investors.
There's a Savings account on Steem to address security. Plus a recovery mechanism. Don't need 13 weeks for that.
Yes, I never said I liked 13 weeks, it's far too long. Something around a week or less is fine for account recovery.
Which is what the Savings account is - 3 days. That's ample time to set the Recovery procedure in motion.