@charlieshrem, thanks for the post, its good to get validation that least a significant amount of the powered down Steem is going towards Steem development.

These are the questions we need to answer as a community to determine whether you should stay powered up or not. They are simple questions but no doubt have complex answers.

Steem is a social network, and as such needs to compete with the incumbents. That's a possibility insurmountable task considering the network effect, machine learning and development advantages the likes of Facebook and Twitter have. That means Steem platforms must offer significant advantage to users, or at least the thought leaders and most popular users, who may drag others. But simply posting the best contributors is not enough. The feature set of Steem must be comparable to improve curation and ease of consumption based upon niche interests, which is what Twitter, Facebook and Reddit all do in different ways. Here is a possible way that Steemit can compete, through incentivised semantic curation: https://steemit.com/steemit/@manipulable/proposal-make-tags-useful-in-steemit-or-copy-linkedin

So can Steemit compete with the incumbents? Maybe, maybe not... But can other applications top of Steem?

That leads to the next question. Can other Steem platforms be revenue generating from the getgo, directly on The blockchain level? Steemit had the advantage of having mined lots of Steem, but subsequent apps have advantage over incumbents, since they would have to resort to a freemium model like Twitter. There is no efficiency there. They would be no better than the incumbents.

If the answer is Yes, then Steem can survive. Steem needs many applications working off the same blockchain. It needs to take a universal approach.

This may or may not be technically feasible. I am not technically capable of evaluating that. But I do know that this is the key to evaluating Steem.

Aside from that fact, further long term questions relate to how the non-ideological participants react to a financially incentivised social network, whether they will act the same as their current behaviour, or if their behaviour is different will those differences be conducive to supporting quality.

Will owning Steem Power actually become desirable? Will influence on Steem actually be desirable? That's an open question but i would suggest it's secondary to the first question, as the environment in which it can be answered cannot come about unless the development of third party Steem apps is well funded and active.

Can you help answer these questions in your enquiry?