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.
Curation should be an incentive to find and upvote quality content but as it is people try to maximize it by following and uptvoting authors (not content) that they expect to get more rewards. Besides that, the best efficiency on upvoting power is only achieved by bots (or an extremly disciplined human) and this also benefits bot curation which hardly ever is content driven.
For it's purpose, curation fails to achieve what is necessary for steemit to grow, that is making people see it as a usefull and fair plataform, where you can find good content easly and get rewarded by helping others to do so.
Great point about the Bots. They are fundamentally experts at curation, since they can work 24/7 and keep exact timers, plus they can analyze data and pick based on expected reward, not on content quality. Bot curation probably makes manual human curation almost totally pointless.
Bots are experts in maximizing curation rewards by time adjust and most probably(*) work on author/elapsed time selection plus some social proof of quality - but not content. There are a few exceptions, like gentlebot, but not enough in my opinion.
(*)this is a huge guess based in what I see, since I can't check the algoritms
I belive without real content driven curation steemit won't succeed. I belive it because without it new users won't see the plataform as fair neither find good content easly. A lot of posts about this subject are comming to the surface and I can't see a solution in the near future, so that's why I am less confident about the future of steemit.
Hopefully I am wrong and/or the community will find a way to fix it.