Let's see if there is a response to your criticism in my article...
Oh yes, here it is:
I am opposed to the EIP, but not because content creators will lose value that they deserve. I am opposed to it because changing the rules makes the risks of holding stake higher. Risks devalue the technology and devalue the stake. I am opposed to it because it's a diversion. I'm opposed to it because the changes don't anticipate 'bad actor' scenarios.
I believe in the technology, too. I'm not optimistic about HF21; I think it's a bad idea. But the discourse around it is dominated by the 50/50 change, which is actually the best part of the proposal.
If the customers think the platform sucks they leave and there is no market.
This is true, but the rest of your comment is focused 100% on the price action... which means that the customers that you care the most about leaving are the curators... because when an author leaves it helps the price action, as their constant selling pressure is removed. It's only when a curator leaves that the price is hurt, because they power down and liquidate their stake.
Run top 500 by author rewards next to top 500 by curation rewards. Strip out the accounts in both lists, and you will have a sample of 'pure authors' versus 'pure curators'. Now take both lists to report on deposits from exchanges versus withdrawals to exchanges. Then come back and tell me which group is hurting the price?
your absolutely right, the contribution to the Steem pool is heavily concentrated on stakeholders. 334 Million virtual supply and 200 Million are staked. In the tulip bubble, the biggest contribution to the price came from the stakeholders. A stakeholder-focused system is a ponzi-scheme. A business can only be sustainable when it is creating value to customers.
The interdependence goes from plankton to whale. This has nothing to do with Marxism. There can be plankton without whales (this was Billions of years the case), there cant be whales without plankton. The economic value and the attractiveness for investors comes from a product value.
Most of socialmedia exists without curation. Heavy used platforms like Reddit and 4chan exist without any economic incentive for users. Right now the use-case of curation isn't even proofed (many quality authors here are scientists and good paid people doing blogging for a hobby). In the special case of Steem(it) your point is in fact very important, it's more a chicken-egg problem because the selling point is having curators ... this makes the problem so unique and hard to solve. Anyways thank you for your input! It's a very special situation I wasn't that aware of.
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It's not that easy. If for example an author writes an article about Steem Monsters, and then 10 % of the readers were considering to buy cards with ... STEEM, then of course the author contributed to a higher value of the STEEM price.
In addition if 5000 potential card buyers were reading that article (because there was a rich pool of satisfied users) it added much more value than if only 50 were reading it. So in my eyes also for blockchain based apllications the formula more users (among most of them authors) = more value is still valid.
I'm aware of network effects, but they're outside the scope of this discussion.
If curators were properly compensated for their stake and more willing to share some of it with content creators as a consequence, there might be greater network effects instead of fewer.
Would you rather have a platform with 100k content creators and no curators, or a platform with 100k curators and no content creators. Both content creators and curators would do better if there were more acknowledgement that the value belongs to the curator by default (it's their money) and the content creators need to entice the curators to reward their content.
I think it's part of the discussion.
If the value of STEEM will rise, then everybody is compensated very well for his stake! If network effects lead to a higher value of STEEM and more satisfied users contribute to that network effect, then stake holders should do their best to support a rich pool of satisfied users by distributing STEEM!
I really wonder why many big account holders are that fixated on their ROI? If the STEEM price raises significantly again, they will be unbelievable rich anyway, if it doesn't, the ROI also doesn't matter much: they have lost money anyway. I personally would agree not to earn one single more STEEM if that would guarantee a significantly higher STEEM price. Better concentrate on making the cake bigger than on getting a bigger part of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller.
(When I bought BTC I also wasn't asking how much interest I would get ...)
That's why the network effect matters for everybody.