I mine steem on EBOT I used the term "Mine" in a loose explanation sense not an actual act of mining. Just to clarify. :-)
This means that removing the rewards structure is impossible, it would become just another blogging platform and quickly die.
Yes, that's what I said. It's not impossible just undesirable for the very reason you mention.
The fact that crypto posts get a lot of traction is probably due to the fact that the early adopters were crypto-savvy, they gained a lot of power and followers, and by that also rewards.Na, people upvote those posts because
It's the bitter truth, if Steemit made no money at all most of the users would leave. To be honest the parable of Steemit to mining in fact does feel accurate , If you look at old posts from a year ago they would make over $10,000 from upvotes. It feels like mining becuase when the difficulty was lower the rewards were higher and similar with steemit. The more users we have and the more the platform matures the lower the upvote value and posts make. I have seen posts by Jerry Banfield mentioning 35,000 SP upvote is worth almost $30 and today its only a dollar.