I am doing it again: Power UP Steem!

I have done this too often, and every time it has gone the wrong way. But I am doing it again. I just put another whole damn bitcoin into steem.

I am a big believer in steem. I have seen it work and I have seen the many great people that steem has attracted and the wonderful content we can find here on a daily basis.

Effectively all of the money I have put into this system so far has evaporated. There are reasons for this. Steem has solved some problems before they were problems and is not focusing enough on its core business model, which is to create valuable content and attract value so that content providers get rewarded according to the value they provide. The roadmap is full of technical details but the core business problems are omitted.

They key issues are:

1. No outside money coming in.

Steem has created a new way to monetize the internet. However it does so by diluting itself which puts pressure on the price. What is missing is a direct way for money to flow from outside in. I have created a proposal to fix this with a bounty system. This would bring direct value to steem and allow to pay curations via other means than dilution: https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value

2. Curation

The curation system is made so that people do vote and do care what they vote for. However the problem with it is that it works in a way that one has to vote on what one thinks others will vote for. As a result the most important aspect of how to determine how value is rewards has been corrupted, destroyed and screwed up. This must be fixed. Today voting is a game played best by bots. Voting must be something that is given back to the users.

3. Rewards

The exponential pay out is unfair. Unfairness is something our society does not like at all. Watch this video to understand. Steemit users feel exactly like these monkeys in the cucumber grape video. Fortunately this is already understood and being solved by the steemit team: https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/details-on-proposed-comment-reward-curve

4. Content presentation and voting.

On steem content is visible for a few hours to a day or so. This limits to what can be posted on steem to news type content. Most of the content on steem however has a much longer time for which it could be valuable. Authors need to be able to create content and this needs to be visible for days, weeks and months especially if it is popular. You can see below a video I posted on youtube. I also posted this on steem. The difference is, on steem it was seen a few hours. On youtube it is seen every day still and more and more people discover it. For me as an author this is important because this way I can collect my hits and rewards over long time. For users this is important because there is way more content to be consumed this way. Imagine in the screenshot below if you cut of the first few hours of the life if this vide. It would have 50 hits and generated no income for me as an author. We need to be smarter on how our content is presented to the users.

So dear steemit and steem team, @dan and @ned. Please look at these high level business challenges that steem is facing and fix them like you have shown to be so very very capable of. So that that we little steem lovers and investors can keep buying steem and ultimately everybody will be happy.

Forever optimistic

I am confident that the steem team will prevent the following scenario:

SteemON!