RE: Perspective: Steem was meant to be for content creators and consumers
I miss the days when Steem was all about content creators and content curators. Today, it's become a free market for opportunists and developers.
What's the difference? Developers create content in the form of software. Authors and Curators post and curate to benefit from the opportunity to earn author and curator rewards - you can quite accurately label them "opportunists" if you like.
There's still some great content here, but few care to reward them anymore.
I don't think that's true at all.
This is understandable, of course, the crypto world revolves around greed, and it's clear where the money is.
I think you have a bad opinion of it, and you're cherry-picking data to support it. There's more great content posted to Steem these days than ever in the past.
There's no technical difference, of course. All content is content, and all curation is curation. However, there's a significant subjective difference in the nature of content. To clear up the semantics, I'm referring to creative blogging in text, video or audio.
The allocation of the reward pool has skewed heavily towards vote trading services, SP delegation services, developers and their votes. The top of the R-shares list today is upme, postpromoter, buildawhale, appreciator and adsactly. Four are vote trading services, and the other mostly just self-votes. This list used to be dominated by curators and curation groups in the past. There's nothing wrong with that either - it's simply where the market is headed. I don't see a single large delegation to content curators by anyone, except for a handful by Clayop and Roadscape, perhaps. Compare this to Early 2017, these mega-whales were entirely supporting curation with all of their stake - Ned, Val, Michael, NGC, Blocktrades, in addition to Clayop and Roadscape. You had other whales like Tombstone and Silversteem supporting curation too, who have now sold out. Freedom and Misterdelegation hadn't entered the market either. These are dramatic trends which can be meaningfully quantified.
As for great content on Steem - there is a lot of it, as I clearly state, and Steem is growing all the time. There's no disputing that. My point was the above.