I think your ideals are fine but Dan is discussing the very nature of a decentralized system, it will get gamed by machine learning sooner or later. This is how Target knew some guy's daughter was pregnant before he did. Everyone is exploiting machine learning to find and recognize patterns that would otherwise be EXTREMELY hard to identify. There is no getting around this, I believe he is predicting the future very well here.
So where does that leave us and how do we move forward? Listen to him carefully, you will still have a roll here...
Curation is a game for whales and dolphins. Minnows are unlikely to earn any significant return on their votes. Minnows should stick to posting and commenting.
Yeah but the role left to us is feeding whales and hoping they pat us on the head now and then? "Bots need data, minnows generate data".
If you have money to invest in such a scale, you should be able to generate a profit. One way or another. I rather get rewarded for being useful for whale bots, and therefore steemit and myself, instead of an investor spending his money elsewhere.
On a really decentralized bots will emerge in a sophisticated manner soon. I totally see being a good minnow getting rewarded.
Ah... but @jsteck, I think you're missing the real point here. What he's saying is if you're a 'good' minnow, i.e. you can spot winners first and vote early, then the clever bots will follow you, and that means your rewards are increased significantly. However if you're not good enough to spot content that is going to go viral, then stick to commenting and posting. Makes a kind of interesting concept.
I am going to keep on re-reading the original post until I see a better point of view. Not seeing it yet but not done trying.
I've thought it over and I am back to where I was a month ago. I'll vote for things I like. I'll comment when I can add to a conversation. And I'll post when I have value to share.
Everybody on Steemit has to take any human personality into consideration - including the 5-10% psychopaths (depending which statistic you prefer).
It would be naive to assume that any alphabet soup group or hacker group of any large GDP country would not at one point try to game the system in their favor. Who knows who really controls the biggest stakes right now behind the anonymous bitcoin wall. We don't even know who Satoshi is - Dan might have a better idea about Satoshi than anyone in here as I am pretty sure NONE of us has interacted as much with Satoshi or the Satoshi group as he did.
From what I have seen so far or researched about Dan he is more altruistic than many on here that complain - mostly for egotistical reasons - being it from a narcisstic angle or just pure profit motive.
It does not matter - the platform will survive and thrive from very sophisticated foresight - coupled with integrating the best feedback from the free market. I feel at this point that the core group around Dan does an excellent job at that.
Who can know that much less altruistic forces are already prepping a not so benign Steemit alternative? Who will stick here if Zucky uses some of his billions to build a Steemit clone with more fiat incentives? Hard questions to answer as nothing conceivable is impossible in principle ;-)