Your sincerity coupled with what I presume to be unawareness, has motivated me to write a very long comment to try to explain why I think you’re not seeing the whole picture.

The "winner-takes-all" outcome is also not a problem for me because the winner is the best content creator.

I disagree with strong conviction, and argue the winner is the cartel. And as I look around not always the best content is being upvoted by the cartel. I already presented for you a link to the game theory, but (and not intended to be pejorative) probably you are not able to fully understand it. One of the challenges in this new technology space is that users are not really able to understand the details that we the programmers and mathematicians do understand about these systems.

I don't agree because they have no incentive to be corrupt. The money lies into taking this product as far as it can go. we can never be 100% sure, but I believe they are clever enough to see this and I trust them because they are incentivized to behave.

I again disagree strongly and I even waited nearly 2 years to observe the outcome before speaking out more strongly as I am now. One can make a reasonable analysis that they make much more money by cashing out while surreptitiously awarding themselves more STEEM POWER via the signup process.

This is because the game theory is a power vacuum, for the case of voting rewards by minting the new tokens from a collectivized money supply. Many people do not fully comprehend what a power vacuum really means. It means that only the most ruthless can dominate the void in power that is available for the taking by the most powerful. I explained the math and logic in the blog I wrote in 2016, which I had already linked for you.

Thus we can make a reasonable presumption that they know the growth of the project in any bona fide manner is impossible. Because to repeat the point I already made, voting rewards by minting them from a collectivized money supply is a power vacuum that will be captured by the most ruthless whales because it will always award MORE THAN PROPORTIONAL rewards to whales (so this means their share of the money supply must increase until they own the entire money supply). That is shown by analyzing the game theory and math. We can quibble a bit about whether there will be exogenous factors which will interfere with complete domination of the money supply, but that is pointless because Steemit, Inc (aka STINC) already dominates the money supply. We can believe they don’t use that dominance for ill gotten gains and we can also believe in Santa Claus and Dumbo The Flying Elephant.

Thus we can reasonably presume they know the only way to really profit is to fool everyone and cash out. I can make these presumptions because from an economic standpoint, this can be simply summarized as “opportunity cost”, i.e. we do not pick the fruit from the top of the tree first. Everyone has an economic incentive to pick the lowest hanging fruit. Most people do not understand economics. I received a perfect grade in Economics 101 at the university.

Of course some few blog authors are rewarded. This was their stated plan to fool everyone which they wrote on page 20 in §Payout Distribution of the original white paper and apparently retained when they rewrote it admits that Steem was designed to fool people and leverage the psychological weakness of people:

The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people over-estimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.

In fact, I was also rewarded in excess of $6000 in 2016. And I presume I was upvoted by whales because at that time I was seen as an influential voice in the Bitcointalk community and so they wanted my support. And they were wise to have purchased my support because you can see by now the $millions they’ve been able to extract from this venture. And I gave Steem my support, because I believe in it conceptually even though I know this particular design is insolubly broken.

The §Voting Abuse of the white paper posits that flagging (aka “negative voting”) those who vote for themselves will eliminate abuse, but we can clearly see that doesn’t stop the use of sockpuppets, voting bots, buying votes, and other means for cartels to asymmetrically (i.e. inequitably) reward themselves. Also flagging and downvoting is deleterious to a social network because it encourages people to think about negative curation instead of positive curation. Downvoting will be entirely unnecessary when one-size-fits-all rankings are no longer used in a replacement for Steem.

You may believe what you want of course. I believe in freedom and free market, so thus I accept disagreement. Hopefully you will not lose all your investment by having it locked up in STEEM POWER if a collapse ensues because some other project comes along and makes it very clear that the design of Steem is highly inferior.

You apparently don’t know the details and the history? The video in this blog goes into some of the detail of how the sneaky premediated by Dan instamine was done to make sure that the insiders ended up with 80+% of the money supply. @smooth is highly respected in the crypto community, very high IQ, expert programmer, and he is also a Steem whale and he can confirm those details for you if you don’t believe it.

Fact is that a phone number verifies nothing. They damn well know that. They have always been cashing out their Steem hoard. And we can safely assume that the 8000 daily signups are not all real users. Those 8000 daily signups are very likely mostly all fake sockpuppets awarding up to 120,000 STEEM POWER daily to the cartel, so they can continue to cash out surreptitiously indefinitely. There are many alleged schemes like this that this corrupt group employs to enrich themselves. Why do you think @‍chyspano censored my Steemit post about consortium blockchains and was so angry about my posts in the EOS thread at Bitcointalk? He must be part of the corrupt schemes. Dash is also an analogous corrupt scheme. Nobody seems to care whilst the greater fools are piling in and providing the funding for the corrupt to cash out. But in the case of Steem, users will care when they can see that they can earn 10–100 times more on the project I will launch. And then that will be the end of Steem. This is not a joke. This corruption has to be stopped. I realize no one else is going to do it, so I have put the task on my shoulders while also trying to recover from a morbid illness and approaching old age of 53. Indeed I have a vested interest in thinking they are corrupt. So do not listen to me. Observe the outcome.

Also Daniel Larimer and his group have a long history of misdoings and selfish schemes, although I must admit they’ve created new technologies and systems that have merit. This has continued with EOS and it documented in several comments in a long thread over at Bitcointalk.org. At the appropriate time I will prepare (or pay someone else to prepare) a blog going over all the alleged scamming in the EOS project, but that is not my priority focus right now. My stance is that as long as they can handle the spotlight of transparency, then what ever they can accomplish in the free market is what it is. The free market includes these government beasts we all (including them) have to contend with.

I’m was there at the start of all this having discussions in 2013 with Daniel Larimer and Charles Hoskinson on Bitcointalk.org when they were designing the DPoS (delegated-proof-of-stake) that powers Steem. As you know Charles Hoskinson went on to found Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin. Charles was kicked out of Bitshares (which was Protoshares and Invictus back then) by Dan. And I know some secrets about the way he was suddenly kicked out in a sleazy way, but I will not repeat it. Charles was very upset at the time, and I encouraged him to be upbeat and make his own project. You will not hear Charles talk about that any more because he went on to become very successful with Ethereum and is now the founder of IOHK which produced Cardano. But he told me the truth back then because he and I were having some informal conversations about doing a project together. Actually I was surprised that he was telling me that information and sort of told him I did not need to know, but he was very upset at the time and he needed someone to talk to. But I told him I was getting too ill (this was late 2013) and then eventually by January 2017, I obtained enough funding to go to Singapore for extensive testing and they discovered gut Tuberculosis was the illness that was making me morbidly ill. I was in a really bad condition and at one point had dropped from 85 kilos (187 lbs) to 55 kilos (121 lbs) body weight. So after I told him that in late 2013, Charles moved on and apparently decided to talk to Vitalik. Then he came back to me and asked me for my technical analysis of Vitalik’s proof-of-work algorithm. After that they put together a group and Ethereum was born. Charles was also kicked out of Ethereum (or let’s say asked to leave) because as a rough summary he wanted them to do the ICO (or venture funding) in a more legally transparent way (you can find a Youtube where he explains this). ^{_{I continued to get more ill to the point where I was basically wallowing in bed and constant brain fog, nausea, systemic inflammation all over my body, and chronic fatigue syndrome, so thus I was unable to code and made me quite desperate, delirious, discombobulated, delusional, and truculent. I completed antibiotic treatment by June 2017; and I’m still recovering from that damage to done to (MRI-confirmed cysts on) my liver, spleen, etc..}}

People don't sign up to social media to make money. I don't care about curation rewards. But I also don't want a centralized company to make money out of my attention, and above all I hate adds. This is the value proposition that steem offers today.

Actually I believe this will change and many people will signup for a new social network project to make money because they will be able to make a lot of money while also helping to promote a better paradigm for society. I have an idealistic and pragmatic outlook backed by my deep understanding of these technologies.

But you are also correct that by providing a better experience, users will also signup for the increased degrees-of-freedom. This has been my thesis for years. No worries mate, I totally understand what the project needs to do.

I have been producing commercial software with professional user interfaces for millions of users throughout my career as a programmer and entrepreneur.

_{Not to be boastful but rather to inform about whether I am capable. I doubt you realize I am one of the original programmers on what is now Corel Painter? Not Corel Paint. That was the software that shipped in a paint can in retail stores and the first commercial program that simulated natural media painting such as the paper gain, bleed, and pressure via a Wacom stylus. Sold a million copies in Japan after I helped make the Windows version by helping to port the Mac API via the Altura Software that Lee Lorensen produced. Lee Lorensen was the creator of Ventura Publisher which was one of the premier software (alongside Aldus Pagemaker) during the desktop publishing revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s that gives us the concept of WYSIWYG web pages. Before that everything on the computer looked like the output of a typewriter. My former boss Mark Zimmer was recruited by Steve Jobs and has been one of the top researchers at Apple Computer. We all use many of his patents in smartphones. I went on to produce CoolPage all by myself, which by 2001 attained usership which was equivalent to 1% of the entire population of the Internet. If I could just repeat that 1% again in my next venture, that would be 10 million real users (not fake sockpuppet accounts).}

_{Off topic but I will throw it in here. As for health update, I had still been struggling with getting very sleepy every day after being awake only ~12 hours. The cysts on the liver and spleen cause that. I starting taking Vitamin E and this seems to help a lot. I manage to run every day even twice a day sometimes. And then I started playing basketball in the mornings past couple of days and I starting to get my athletic power coming back. This morning when I woke up I could not work without jogging first. I had too much power and energy. Felt like I was 30 years old again. I am starting to get on those intense periods of several hours where I can work with full energy and clarity. The liver and spleen cysts are not entirely gone yet. I still feel them. Still causing me energy and brain fog problems. But I think this is continuing to improve.}