It's hard for me to know what specifically you're looking for, so I'll throw a few things at the wall here. Feel free to ask more detailed questions. Some further discussion in Part 2 of this post as well.
What are your thoughts when you put yourself into the shoes of a business person who is coming into steem solely to make money?
Well, when I was this guy at the beginning, my only real question was "can I make a bunch more money from delegating Steem than I can by holding BTC?" Which turned out to be true but incomplete.
From a passive investor's perspective there's plenty of money here without ever posting. Dropping the self-vote bonus will probably cut the delegation market a little bit, but it's unlikely to be significant and there's plenty of headroom.
From a product developer's perspective things are pretty great too. You don't even have to do something particularly good to get a big delegation from Steem Inc - see SteemHunt and Steempress - and you can get a lot of support from Utopian if you do it right.
The rest of the site almost doesn't have to be usable for those things to remain true. But usability adds a layer of bringing in smaller investment from larger numbers of people.
Until steem becomes its own self sufficient entity/country aren't we relying on people bringing money into the system to give it any value?
I'm not sure whether to recommend looking into what would happen to the US economy if everyone outside stopped buying USD or to advise you not to. It's a little scary. "Self-sufficiency" in this sense doesn't exist.
Thank you tcp.
People can exist comfortably within their "region" in the sense that they can get all they need to survive. Some may want to export/import etc but ultimately a person can be self sufficient. This has already been shown to be possible on bitcoin though it's challenging. I can see a day when it is possible on steem.
But the main reason I bring that up as an example is because it creates the context for needing money to "come into" steem given it's not a reality yet. I brought my money in so that I could actually "do" something. My 15 sp delegated from steemit was not getting me anywhere and I wasn't hitting any "veins" so to speak that were taking me anywhere fast. But people bringing money in like I did to buy votes and to improve voting power by itself is kind of a ponzi scheme imho whereas I think steem has so much more potential than that.
The blogging aspect is rich and keeping quality up is important. But I also think it's great as a collaboration space including gathering people from around the world for investment, with ease.
I didn't like the bid bots however when looking at it from the perspective of a business they are a tool that helps things along a little. One of the arguments on the pro side is that they bring money in like advertising.
This is why I was after your collective thoughts specifically when viewed from the shoes of an entity that simply wants to make money and does not care about the culture or content. Because ultimately this to me seems like where much of the money in the world is.
I will check out your other post. Thanks.