RE: Locking stake for 100% passive income, improving content, helping apps
In my opinion big investors should be pushed to commit to improving the platform
While it is a beautiful idea that everyone on the platform actively involves in improving it, that's just not the reality. We already see it with people who are here, and outside there will be a lot more investors who are just not interested in engaging in this kind of, or even any kind of, social media activity.
There's no other investments which force investors to work for their ROI (well, real estate, but that's a very different market). Usually investors want their "money to work for them".
Any kind of work in a system like this can be automated, and over time that automation improves and becomes accessible for more and more people (often through middlemen, we even see middlemen between the middlemen on steem already, a bot usage service).
The social stigma doesn't hold off everyone, and the more users do something considered bad behavior the less pressure it creates.
Of course the "interest" here is higher than for most other investments you can get, but we're still early on and inflation will drop over the years.
So in the end, by expecting participation, we limit our possible investors to a subset of social media users, software developers, people who use the platform in ways it wasn't intended for, and some real heavy risk takers who believe the idea will outprice the inflation. Offering something to non techy investors who don't want to curate or even self vote 2 or more times a day seems absolutely necessary to me if we want to be successful in the market.
Well from an investment point of view, you're mostly looking for some kind of dividend and hopefully a price increase. At the current time I think it's fair to say that the bidbots provide this kind of dividend to investors, but are definitely putting downward pressure on the price long term.
Again, I do like the passive approach proposed here, but I strongly believe active investors should be getting more out of the platform than passive ones. How to make this a reality is a different matter and likely not easy to solve.
If we look at the whales on Steem for example, we have a lot of them who are very talented developers / community managers / etc. etc., but a lot have stopped doing any of that on Steem as the work vs reward just makes it way more tempting to use bid bots. Even though long term if bid bots remain around, they could very well be the end of growth for Steem.
Making it passive, as proposed here, won't get those people to do more again for Steem in my opinion, where they did have the motivation to do it before bid bots came along. But it would at least likely eliminate most bid bots, which is something I am really looking forward to.
I do think that the proposed solution here is a lot better compared to what we have now with the bid bots, but at the same time I think more incentives for active participation would not be a bad thing either.