Paula is saying something I have been thinking for quite some time. Too many people on Steem (and in crypto in general) are over valuing investors, developers, the concept "build it, and they will come" and other stuff like that. Although development and investment are important, Steem actually functions in its current state relatively fine.

The real issue is that we're not properly incentivizing content consumers and content producers. Content producers are not really earning enough, but that is mainly because we do not have enough content consumers with SP that can reward those producers.

We are not intriguing content consumers to hold SP. Actifit's delegation model has the potential to help in this area, because eventually people will be able to buy real world stuff with their tokens. That's cool.

If Steemhunt is not doing that yet, it should be. But we need more than that, we need a lot of incentives for consumers. Only bot managers will value that 25% upvote reward, because for the vast majority of consumers they'll never understand why they should have more SP than needed for basic resource credit expenses.

Additionally, for the average consumer, unless its something like upvoting instagram-like pics or twitter-like posts, 10 upvotes is difficult. Most consumers will read a Medium post or 2, but 10 a day? I easily read 10 full length posts, but I am a swing trader and keep my ear to the ground, that's not a usual content consumer. This means most consumers will not receive optimal rewards for curating content.

Right now it takes about 260 SP to give a content consumer a $0.01 upvote value, which at $0.29 is a $75.40 investment. I don't expect most people to agree to pay for something that costs more than $50, and there must be a huge incentive to motivate someone to do $50.

Let's imagine the market was stable to the numbers previously mentioned. If that average consumer spent the $75.40 to be able to upvote people for $0.01 to get 25% of it, and upvoted 10x a day without fail, they would be rewarded with just $9.125, which means it takes over 8 years for them to get their value back... Obviously this is not counting compound interest, which improves the rates, but for simplification sake, its so insignificant that it's laughable.

Again, the only value of curation rewards is for bot managers, because they require payment for advertising, increasing their 25% share of the reward pool to a significantly larger share.

So we have clear incentives for witnesses, developers, content producers, investors and bot managers on Steem, but we're missing incentives for the most important member of a social network: the socialite.