It is not essencially wrong to run a half-plutocratic/half-aristocratic model, but that's not what most people are signing for and without the majority all your steem will have near-to-zero value in the future. Newcomers are realizing it and trying to change the way things are instead of just leaving. Being heavly invested in steem you should be grateful and not angry about it. ;)
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The (currency) value of Steem Power rewards comes from those who are willing to buy it and literally nothing else. Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power. There are thousands of these users costing the platform money for every significant investor.
Which is more valuable to court, and which is in shorter supply, is fairly obvious.
The value of BTC is just as you describe Steem. The number of users of Steem, however, is driven by Steemit. If Steemit fails, Steem will no longer have a use case, which will negatively impact it's value.
More significantly, the reverse is true. It is the content that users, those that invest nothing but time, money, and expertise, bring to Steemit, upon which the value of Steem depends.
This was the intent of Steemit. This is it's whole raison d'etre, according to the white paper.
I have nothing but good things to say about investors in Steem, however, investors traditionally invest in order to achieve capital gains, not to complain about the workers in the plant 'that only cost investors wages'.
It is those workers that potentiate Steem having any value beyond what BTC does.
Hey, I just want to clarify some confusion, and say that I totally agree with you.
Newcomers being a cost is fact. They cost money in account creation and delegation, I've seen the numbers.
However, I was referring to these ones:
"Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power."
I wasn't clear, and I should have been. When I said "invest nothing", I also meant the time required to create "quality content". Which, admittedly, most users do not produce. There are many users who have never produced a piece of quality content and that have generated less in total rewards than it cost Stinc/the blockchain to create their accounts.
Those are the ones I mean. The botnets, the sock puppets, the plagiarizers, most of /created (aka /new).
Minnows who create content that garners more rewards (un-botted) than their account cost to create are the bomb, and eventually they turn into dolphins which turn into whales.
There are a lot of posts by people that I have little interest in. However, just cuz I don't find it thrilling doesn't mean that pics of Kim Kardashian aren't 'quality content'.
Botnets, sock puppets, and the like, can all be damned, as far as I'm concerned. I do not equate such malicious actors with folks that post stuff I have no interest in, or vehemently disagree with.
I think you're touching on a serious point that no one wants to clarify properly. Investors in steem should not be entitled to anything but the steem they purchased. In the event it goes up in value, they win.
At the moment, though, they get to endlessly drain the rewards pool for themselves which makes no sense.
It is the witnesses who deserve compensation as they are essentially keeping the blockchain running.
I hope you'll consider joining the conversation in the comments of my newest post on these issues. We really need to highlight these problems for anything to change.
Maybe I am wrong, but I belive the value of steem is a consequence of the potential percieved and/or realized by steemit and other(?) steem plataforms. That's what makes people buy steem, the future potential of all this, not the short-time reward they can make upvoting themselves.
That being true, newcomers actually are showing there is real potential for steemit to reach mass adoption and without it -
being a small club of investors - steem worth close-to-nothing unless those investors are willing to invest more and/or never cashout.
For that reason, I completly disagree with your perception of newcomers as cost and I belive that if most whales see things the same way you, steem is not landing anywhere close to the moon and I will probably lose those 500 usd I invested in steem potential.
Hey, I just want to clarify some confusion, and say that I totally agree with you.
Newcomers being a cost is fact. They cost money in account creation and delegation, I've seen the numbers.
However, I was referring to these ones:
"Newcomers who invest nothing actually cost the platform substantially, in account creation fees and delegated power."
I wasn't clear, and I should have been. When I said "invest nothing", I also meant the time required to create "quality content". Which, admittedly, most users do not produce. There are many users who have never produced a piece of quality content and that have generated less in total rewards than it cost Stinc/the blockchain to create their accounts.
Those are the ones I mean. The botnets, the sock puppets, the plagiarizers, most of /created (aka /new).
Minnows who create content that garners more rewards (un-botted) than their account cost to create are the bomb, and eventually they turn into dolphins which turn into whales.
So we agree that steemit value depends on it's potential adoption and it depends on minnows and new users enjoying the plataform and use it - not botnets, not sock puppets or plagiarizers - real users/minnows who produce content want to make steemit a usefull tool for themselves and others.
What is happening is that exactly those "target audience" are the guys who are complaining about the reward system, like this post. Not the botnets, who are actually exploiting the current model. Not power users, who are able to understand and use some tools in their favor or famous youtubers who get some support from whales.
I had a few talks about the subject and read many posts about it. Can't see steemit solving this issue on a short term. Maybe famous youtubers can be enought to bring people here, but why would they buy steem? Why would they even make an account? Maybe a few super fans...
Anyway, I may be totally wrong about this, but after seeing real potential active users leaving steemit because of the reward system and after reading the position of relevant people here, I am not confident steemit will endure.
Game theory helps us understand the choices people make, and the perspective on that matter is also not very good.
For those reasons, I decide to power down all my SP for now and change it back in BTC on the next weeks. I will keep an eye on steemit and maybe come back when it looks like a good investment again.
Thanks for the talk!
" I will keep an eye on steemit and maybe come back when it looks like a good investment again."
That will mean the price is substantially higher than it is now. Steem looks like it's in a slump now, maybe undervalued. I'm loathe to sell at this time.
I think most of the minnows complaining about rewards overestimate what they contribute. I quickly made over $1000 in rewards here with no initial investment. I had several posts over $300 in my first week when I had only delegated SP from Steemit.
People think if they work hard on one or two posts and aren't making bucks, it's time to give up. This is a marathon, not a spring.
This does not adress the problems I mentioned. Sure, it is possible for one or another to make a reasonable or even awesome rewards for their work, but for most cases there is not a correlation between quality content and rewards.
The issue is: current curation/reward system simply does not work. Specially for the majority, newcomers who see their efforts being less rewarded than bots and spammers.
Unfortunately, I belive that without the majority steem will be just a nicho plataform and grow on a very slow pace - in case it doesn't die. Until this thing is fixed, I belive steem is actually overpriced. Perspectives are not good and it will be hard to change de course since the short-time economic incentives point in the current direction for those who have influence in the plataform.
That said, my decision for now is to stay out and wait for changes on those matters. I really like the concept of steemit, love the idea of a plataform that grants freedom of speech on a descentralized way, hope the community find a solution soon.
Maybe I am wrong, let's see how thongs go =)
Best of luck!
"The issue is: current curation/reward system simply does not work. "
I think this is a big part of the problem. The curation system should encourage upvoting others more. However, from my own observations, it rather strongly encourages upvoting yourself or creating bot nets. Maybe adjustment to the 30 minute rule is necessary, or maybe curation simply needs to have its overall coefficient reduced.
Either way, curation is hard to abuse and I think it should be rewarded more.