And especially after reading your last paragraph about waiting several years for something to happen... I'm trying to stay positive about the future of STEEM as a social media network, but after reading your comment and Steemit tryouts to "solve" something, moving the focus here and there, I'm not sure that it will happen, ever...

Here is the big, overwhelming problem that nobody wants to talk about.

It won't happen. It literally can't happen. Not only does the Steem blockchain have too much technical debt, too much technical investment sunk into processes and assumptions which aren't borne out in terms of helping maintain the environment as a social media network, they have too much in terms of man-hours sunk into design and planning for "upcoming features" which have nothing to do with solidifying the system as the backbone of a social media network.

If you ever find yourself "trying to stay positive" about anything, that is your true consciousness telling you that you shouldn't be staying positive. If it's work, it's not real positivity.

You can definitely be positive about things that are currently broken. You can be positive about projects that are having problems. People are and do every day. They don't have to "try" and do that; they do that. They don't have to try and stay positive; they stay positive.

As I have said before, I think that STEEM will go in the background, and stay the cornerstone of other social networks (tribes, communities) that will be build on it... And that's completely fine from my point of view... Actually, I would like to see it ASAP, because these negative actions on STEEM are poisoning the community and the possible investors to take STEEM into consideration...

I've been writing on and about the platform and the technology for over two years now, and I'm going to tell you right now – what you've said here is a pipe dream. The Steem blockchain itself is just like every other blockchain technology architecture ever, it's just a database. It's a distributed database with a complicated means of determining what nodes in the cluster are providing data which should be integrated into the rest of the cluster, but it is, as an underpinning, just a database. And when we talk about databases and how they are integrated with social media platforms, you have to justify why one particular database is better than another particular database for the purpose. This is a general failure model for most of the platforms which talent how aggressively they integrate blockchain technology.

The Steem blockchain is no different.

So – can we imagine a social media platform which fulfills its basic directives better than that which arises from the Steem blockchain? Absolutely. I've written multiple articles, specified multiple systems, which do so. Are they functionally incompatible with the means by which the Steem blockchain focuses its resources on delivering possibilities to tools built on top of it? By and large, unfortunately, yes.

It goes back to one of the basic assumptions which underlies the entirety of the Steem blockchain, what it is designed to do, and how it is designed to reward participants. It's very simple.

The Steem blockchain is predicated on the assumption that everyone knows what I should like better than I do.

That is the basic assumption. My votes are scaled not in relation to how many votes I cast but in relation to how many votes everyone casts. The system ignores me and what I signal to it, except to obsess over jiggling numbers around in the database instead of obsessing over the user and bringing them things that they want, that gratify them. The wisdom of the crowd is paramount over the wisdom of the individual when it comes to the experience of the individual on the Steem blockchain.

That's just wrong. It's not only philosophically wrong, being overtly authoritarian, but it is provably, objectively wrong, and the dwindling user base on the Steem blockchain reflects how wrong that assumption is.

I don't care about trying to cater to investors because investors have a very simple formula by which they decide if something is worth sinking their money into: Does this thing to serve a purpose that people will use? If so, it's valuable to them and thus valuable to the investor.

Step one, a thing has to work. Everything else comes after that.

I have suggested elsewhere that the STEEM token is not a cryptocurrency which gets its value from magical handwaving, as most people would have it, but in fact represents very precisely the perceived value of the last week's worth of content posted to the Steem blockchain. And only that. Why a week? Because content older than a week cannot be rewarded, and as such its value is nothing (within the context that the Steem blockchain is designed to represent). Taken from this perspective, the precipitous plunge of the value of STEEM makes perfect sense; the value of the content being posted to the Steem blockchain, week over week, is almost nothing. And as it dwindles, it becomes more and more masturbatory, more and more obsessed with talking about itself, more and more valueless except taken as people trying to advertise themselves to other people who are themselves trying to advertise themselves.

You get what you reward, and what is rewarded here is ignoring content, ignoring individuals, and pretending that the only thing that's important is whether numbers in a database go up. And having pretended so, that becomes true – and they aren't going up. They haven't been going up for some time.

So steel your nerves and resolve that unless magic happens, which is theoretically possible, the Steem blockchain has eaten itself, snake-tail-like, and is probably done. It's a lousy social media platform database on top of which it is difficult to build a good social media platform because of the limitations provided by the blockchain architecture itself.

Could a good social media network be built on top of the Steem blockchain? Theoretically. But why would you do that? You're already burdened by the history and bad decisions of Steemit Inc., you're burdened by several years of a vast amount of content which is effectively valueless except for the fact you must retain it in order to update the chain of hashes going forward, you know that the database itself can only grow and never be purged or shorted off into an archive, even though it is literally useless to you.

A good social media developer with an inspiration and an idea for a new approach would start with something new. Blockchain technology is trivial to implement these days. Why would you use the Steem blockchain? You take on all the costs and you get very few advantages while locking yourself in with bad process, bad developers, and a bad experience.

Could it happen? Sure. And I could suddenly sprout up another 4 inches, bulk up, and go out for basketball. Is it likely?