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What makes Steem different from the thousands of other altcoins on the market? What new utility does it bring that makes it useful in a unique way? That is what average people need to find valuable in a coin. For Steem, it is a blog where the coin can add weight to your vote. That is what keeps it from being just another forgotten coin worth a couple Satoshi. And it is the creators of content who support that.

The content attracts readers and more content creators, but unless they invest in Steem financially, they don't add to the reward pool, as far as I understand it.

The financial investors are symbiotically connected to the content creators who invest time and effort into creating the ecosystem that drives the market value. Without content and community, your investment falls to zero. We drive the demand that creates a price. If you cannot see this, you are blind. But don't worry. I can sell you an authentic Steem Pope indulgence for a mere 100 SBD to absolve your sins against Blog. :D

I see that, but I also see that, as @rhondak pointed out, both creators and investors are needed. One without the other adds little value.

Thus the word "symbiotic."

Then we are in agreement ;-)

Not entirely. Too many "investors" are downright disdainful of those of us who write original content on a daily basis and see us as adversaries somehow. They think our post rewards are costing them something.

I think this might not actually be true, and we can prove it by looking around.

We know that social networks work. They function. Social media is one of the big killer apps of the decade and possibly longer. All of those social media operations have existed without some sort of blockchain-supported currency and done extremely well. There's a reason that everyone will compare your social media platform to Twitter, Facebook, and even smaller operations like Gab and Medium.

All of those were established well before forms of creator compensation were considered useful to add to extant social media platforms, and flourished.

Investors in STEEM? Without the backing of creators who are actually engaging in making content which will draw people to the platform in order to engage?

They are just people who have thrown money at their screen and look disgruntled when it doesn't magically reproduce.

Investors really aren't needed. Even if STEEM had no backing or connection to fiat currencies, it would still be a mechanism (albeit a deeply flawed and problematic one) for helping rank and sort content being created for potential quality.

Creators literally are the value of STEEM. And in the context of Steemit as a platform, they are the only revenue generators for STEEM. The rest is just bots talking to each other, passing around tokens that don't really mean anything and have no context.

Frankly, I consider that a problem. Other people, clearly, feel differently.

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