You hit the nail on the head man. I've been here for only about a month or so and honestly I see more glaring flaws than good developments. I've said this elsewhere many times, Steemit needs TWO big things in order to stay alive, even in the face of developed competition like Reddit and Facebook and countless other forums on the internet:
A good reason for people to want to be on the platform itself, to engage with it as a user
A good reason for people to want to buy Steem
They are connected, because clearly what Steemit has on Reddit is that the karma translates to actual money paid out. But if no one buys the money, then you are effectively not getting paid. And right now, no offense but playing games with the bandwidth of the platform really doesn't cut it as the sole reason to buy Steem. If all there is to do with this currency is to power it up and delegate around and make money upvoting or selling your vote and so forth, then it will dry up as soon as that becomes unprofitable. This is not a problem that is unique to Steemit, that is a problem all cryptocurrencies share and frankly Steemit is actually one step ahead in that regard because it actually has a function, as opposed to that of most cryptos which is exactly jack shit.
But just look at upvote calculator right now: you need 70 steem power for your vote to be worth 1 cent, and even then people get paid out half a cent in sbd and like 0.1 cent or something in SP. Aside from the fact that that even is below the threshold where you will get paid, or someone else gets paid when you upvote them, it means that someone needs to fork out about 70 x 3 to 5 dollars however much steem costs at the moment, let's say 2 USD. So 140 USD for your vote to count a cent. When you can right now go to Reddit and have the same experience and never pay anything, ever. Like for real, there HAS to be something on the platform that you can use Steem on, because people won't keep on just buying the currency. The current downtrend may well be the start of the end in that regard. If there is no market volume anymore, if there is no one on Poloniex or Bittrex or whatever forking out bitcoin for Steem you my friend who "earns" a hundred bucks on every post are boned.
I mean can you see average joe wanting to get on social media and get greeted with a white paper and convoluted modeling and technicals about what Steem and Steem Power and SBD are, AND also have to buy some of that on some crypto exchange? It sounds ludicrous really. And on the flipside the visibility is SO bad on this platform that you really need to actively filter by tags to get away from the endless crytpo circlejerk and even then you're more than likely still awash in a sea of shit posts. So even if you are somewhat popular, you need 500 new accounts to vote on a post so that you can make one dollar. That is absolutely abysmal, and it will not happen. The only way you can hope to get any traction is to play the upvote bot game, which adds to the pressure to buy steem and keeps the economy going, yes, but in of itself doesn't offer another reason to buy the currency other than platform internal stuff that you may or may not care about.
Plus there's no moderation and any whale can appoint themselves as a resident party pooper and flag your posts and there's nothing you can do about it. Think about it, when and if the platform gets any kind of traction, Facebook can set up a dark fund where they dedicate like a million bucks to stopping this platform. All they need to do is buy a bunch of steem and make a few SP heavy accounts, and then go on a spree flagging everything on the site. With 20-100 accounts like that and a bot network they can stop this site from working, as everything is being downvoted into oblivion. No one gets paid, people get the shits with the platform.
Like for real, being on this platform to me now is like an exercise in sadomasochism. Every other day something else happens that turns my stomach here.
Shit that's a well thought out comment, you should just write that as a post haha. But you're right I've introduced a bunch of real life people here and they just don't see the point, its too much work for too little in exchange, to understand the system here and be able to profit from it is becoming a losing battle.
The no moderation I kind of like, it helps serve the whole decentralised idea but the problem is it kind of has moderators, or rather the whales moderate you know. If they don't like something or they disagree then pow there goes your post. It's how we end up with flag wars like between bernie and haejin but thats detrimental to the platform too. I guess the concept works but in reality it doesn't. The people that were here first, premined all the steem etc are the ones who have control now and probably for as long as the platform lasts.
Yeah absolutely, there just are no checks and balances. Like realistically the admins on Reddit and Facebook can remove and edit posts however they like, but people watch that like a hawk. Plus there's always ways to appeal things. Ultimately that impacts on how people see the platform, like look at Digg for instance, it went down in flames exactly BECAUSE of admins and power users abusing the platform to the point where others felt they had no impact on it at all. Frankly I would like to see a mass migration from Facebook in particular, it's by far the most abusive platform in that respect. On a whim they declare that your page is no longer desirable to them and delete it.
But still it doesn't help that Steemit is basically based on vigilante justice. Like a mod here is basically just a whale who takes matters in their own hands. The only way to somehow then alleviate the abuse is to reach out to other whales, who may or may not care to do something. And why should they, they too don't want to run afoul of some bully. This is everything bad about the legal system in real life, brought to a discussion platform.
Like for real shit like this never works. We see this kind of thing play out in a big way in the crypto sphere too. "Hurr durr banks and governments are criminals, all taxation is theft and regulation is oppression", next minute the whole economy is run by gangsters. It's slowly getting better but the crypto economy is still 99% scam. The currencies themselves are not needed, and there is zero recourse for when someone fucks you over. Anyone can claim they've been "hacked" and oops we lost the money in your wallet tee hee. Naturally then the crypto cunts instead of taking a valuable lesson of course sound off smugly like hurr you should have taken all these steps to make things secure, really it's your fault for not single handedly learning how fucking cryptography works and how to oversee every step in your crypto trades with programs that are shit to use. And then we throw around the figure that it's still only like 3% of people using it all, just wait until more people buy bitcoin and whatever. Yeah those might be connected buddy, the reason why so few people use it is because of how shit it all is. Compare that to even Visa or Paypal where it's easy as fuck to buy things you want and just get on with life. No one fucking cares that transactions are faster. Only people in fintech think that people are kept up at night because their transactions take a second more to process or some shit. When you already have paywave or something, and supposedly third world countries are where you should introduce cryptos because of how corrupt the banks and governments there are. Well guess what, those corrupt banks and governments can just as well outlaw that and you're on your ass again. The problem has always been the people, not the technology.