Yes you are right in that strictly speaking, it is fairer for the blockchain to fund development across the entire chain rather than just steemit.com
My suggestion would, admittedly, somewhat sacrifice the fairness of the distribution in return for a more concentrated development force. I feel that this may be necessary to truly compete with the established heavy weight competitors in the social media sector. There is a practical balance to be struck between decentralized system, decentralized distribution, and centralized development power. A perfectly fair distribution is of a high but finite value, and I think empowering our key development team is of even higher value and will yield greater returns for the entire ecosystem. This is a primarily a pragmatic concern.
I do understand your point and will certainly be open to it if many do not agree with my above view. Basically anything is a better use of funds than the 1.5% pa interest.
On the point of arbitrary rewards, yes, Steemit Inc certainly has the ability to unilaterally extract rewards from their platform since the last hardfork. But ability is one thing, having the voluntary support of the community is another thing entirely, and I was hoping the community would unite behind them. This would allow them to be more bold in their marketing and help accelerate development, two things which we very much need more of.
I'm not affiliated with Steemit Inc, nor they have not expressed any intention to acquire any funds, and they certainly have not suggested implementing arbitrary rewards on steemit.com. This is my own unilateral suggestion, but I do think it would go a long way to future development. This is especially true if every other project will implement arbitrary rewards except the flagship site.
I share your perspective that empowering our key development team is of utmost importance. Personally, I am happy to delegate power to a centralized team for the advantages that brings and don't worship at the alter of decentralization like it's some sacred covenant. It's useful for some things and not for others.
I've probably made this analogy a million times, but here it is again. I have a seafaring background, and when you're on a sailing vessel, at sea, you need a captain. For the simple fact that when a crisis arises you need the most experienced, trusted person on your crew, the captain, to make a decision about the appropriate response, and fast! If the crew were operating on a consensus decision-making model, by the time they reached agreement about what to do, they would likely be at the bottom of the ocean. You don't put the cook in charge of making decisions about navigation, or warfare... but the cook, and everyone else trusts the captain to make those decisions on their behalf.
Bitshares has the worker proposal model, which allows shareholders to vote on which projects it wants to fund. I don't necessarily like that model. It's too many cooks in the kitchen in my opinion, back to the problem with cooks making decisions about things they might not know anything about.
On Steem, we have no such governance structure, but if we could wave a magic wand and re-apportion that 1.5%, or even create a new n% pool to fund development if there's too much resistance to the former, I would simply suggest that one representative from every Steem blockchain project have a seat on a council, and that the representative from Steemit, being the key development group, would be the natural 'chairperson'. This would create a budget for the various Steem projects, with peer-group oversight by the parties involved in developing new services on Steem. In this scenario, they could all decide, if they were of a similar opinion to you and I, to apportion the lion's share of development funds to Steemit Inc., to manage as they see fit. Note, that in this scenario, I as a Steem shareholder, have no say in the matter, unless I am also on a development team, and I'm perfectly fine with this, because frankly... i'm just a cook. ;) ok, I'm not really a cook, but, film guy or rambling commenter, same difference. It behooves the development teams to listen to their user-base / token-holders, but the token-holders themselves aren't directly in control of apportioning funds. Not these funds anyway.. they get to vote on post payouts and such, as part of the existing scheme.
As to unilaterally extracting rewards from the Steemit platform. This is a less cooperative, and more competitive model for achieving the same result. I would personally have no issue, in fact I would support, Steemit Inc. or any other app developer taking a percentage of rewards to fund development.
Let's consider the alternatives... Advertising? Spying? Nah, that's the facebook model. As Eben Moglen says, "on Facebook you get spying for free!"
For the moment, Steemit is in a particularly interesting situation, because they have a huge chunk of all available Steem, so that may sway people's opinion about them taking a percentage of rewards on top of that, but... after the Steem is distributed in a 'prime the system' fashion, across other project's development, community marking, and what have you.. please, for the love of god, I would want them to just take a cut for everything that they build and sustain. If they get greedy they will be punished by the market, so it's in their interest to take only as much as necessary to fund development, marketing, and perhaps further expansion of the Steem ecosystem.
I don't know why else we introduced reward splitting if not for these reasons... it's just the elephant in the room right now I think, but it needn't be.
Yes, I agree and I like that sailing analogy
Development decisions can be too unwieldy if it were too open. I like the committee idea but they'll be a strong conflict between the reps to want the funds for their own projects, how about something simpler and fairer? You get a certain base % if your Steem platform makes the top X in terms of attention generated measured by rewards, and another pro rata amount based entirely on rewards. Eg, if the top 3 are Steemit, Busy, and Steepshot, and they pull in 80%, 15%, 5%, then everyone gets a certain base amount, and then another portion of the funds is allocated in a 80/15/5 split.
Far more efficient as it's automated and a lot fairer
Yeah, I'm sure some scheme can be developed to make it more of an automated process, less dependent on human decisions, and I know everyone will want to do this because that's what blockchains can do. Your idea for apportioning rewards based on attention measured by rewards is a good start I think, if people want to move in this direction.
But personally, I still trust the wisdom of humans to oversee dynamic systems, and emergent blockchain ecologies, including and not limited to apportioning resources. I feel that an over-reliance upon code will make us weak in the end. Blockchains don't need to completely remove trust, they need to minimize or remove the need for it where it matters most. At the end of the day, blockchains exists to serve human needs, and humans ought to be the caretakers of such systems.
Good discussion, I think we're way off into the speculative future now... but it's good. :)