RE: (Very) Basic stuff Steem needs to fix: my personal list
You've clearly done a great deal of thinking on these matters, and I don't think you're wrong. However, I disagree that inflation based rewards are unsustainable, or that advertising is beneficial on a platform wide basis. Despite the apparent contradiction, I don't actually disagree with your financial considerations. It's just that I reckon a growing platform can sustain inflation based rewards - it has demonstrated brief stints of this in the past, during rapid growth - and that advertising revenue will lock Steem on a path that is better avoided. The latter is not a financial matter at heart, but a social one. The social benefits of the rewards mechanism when deployed functionally, as in encouraging content and not profiteering, I believe can nominally create financial incentives.
They have not because profiteering has been encouraged instead, and this has destroyed the social benefits of Steem. Advertising revenues will but continue this destruction IMHO, unless advertising is limited to individual blogs, which ads users can avoid by not reading those blogs if they so choose. Should the platform undertake advertising, that will encourage adblocking, which will kill advertising - and the platform based on it, Steem itself - as a revenue stream. I am slowly coming to grips with the realization that the devs that created Steem seem now to have been intent on abusing the social network in order to personally profit, and this underestimates the power of social interactions, while overestimating (or not at all caring about) the ability of society to be corralled sustainably by cowboys seeking no more than to profit from the herd.
From the perspective of the originators of Steem, it seems to have run it's course. The potential of the voluntarist society the inflation based rewards mechanism enabled has not been adequately developed, and instead has been parasitized, resulting in the disappointment of users initially attracted to that potential and horrible user retention.
I'm a hopeless romantic, and will probably have to turn off the lights after everyone else leaves if the profiteering isn't abandoned for capital gains and social engagement. HF21 prophecies doom from my perspective, and today I but wish I was wrong about that.
I greatly appreciate your sound thinking on the matter, although I reckon focus on financials is the reason we are in this death spiral and focusing on creators is the onramp we missed, focusing on voluntarist society itself, and that can yet get Steem back on track.
Thanks!
Inflation is definitely sustainable where an active economy has been bootstrapped. But outside of BTC and ETH, that is simply not the case. Steem is far, far off, and like I said, the Dr. Evil pipe dream is dead.
I'd urge you to check out Basic Attention Token. It's not the traditional advertising with banner ads and pop ups that you're thinking of.
BAT is an offshoot of Brave, which is owned by a particular multinational (the entity that owns AXA, and much more, linked to Bilderberg) that I presently believe has nefarious intentions. The rhetoric about it is great, the corporate originators of that rhetoric are duplicitous IMHO. I do understand that advertising is more than banners and popups, but also that people innately resent - and more importantly, resist - psychological pressure, and all advertising is psychological pressure.
As the understanding of the market becomes more sophisticated under the incessant and increasing onslaught of that pressure, resistance is going to grow until it becomes a white hot sword of purification for some, while for all it will be resented and reviled as manipulative and contrary to honest representations.
As Orwell noted, when lies become politically necessary, the truth becomes revolutionary, and everyone needs must have some core of truth they can rely on. All we hear is more and more manipulation, and immersing Steem itself in that vile pot of swill will engender backlash.
I don't disagree with your financial considerations. I just don't think they matter in the long run. The social interaction between good folks will, and that is the golden goose that will lay Steeming eggs of capital gains.
I don't expect anyone to listen to me. At this point I only hope my rants eventually grow into understanding of what actual value is, what really matters to people, so that the essence of the voluntarist government Steem could have become is developed here, or elsewhere. Money itself is not valuable. Gold has no monetary value. Paper can be burned for heat, or pasted on walls as decoration, and gold has industrial uses, but money itself does not. It's able to be a shortcut to value, but it is defiled by financial manipulation and decentralization will eventually render it utterly obsolete.
In the meantime, it has been used to extract wealth - parasitizing actual human interaction - from social media on Steem, and that manipulation, inexorable and ubiquitous, has caused users to abandon Steem because they are angry and unwilling to be nothing more than cash cows exploited by substantial stake holders.
People, relationships, production of goods that people need, those things have value. Money has devalued those things on Steem, and that is the detour that has brought us to this impasse. It can be fixed, I think, still on Steem.
As I said, I am a hopeless romantic.