RE: A Simple Way to Strengthen the STEEM Economy
Although I like the idea of incentivizing burning of STEEM, I have recently argued in The Sustainability of Steem - Is Freemium Broken? that ads are ultimately not what users should want, even though it might make the platform (more) sustainable.
The problem is that the goals of advertisers are always different than those of users. Placing irrelevant posts into the feed will always degrade user experience. And if the posts are not irrelevant, then they don't need paid promotion (they need recommendation, better organic reach).
Interfaces might act on the incentive of taking a cut of the promotion, but it will still be just fixing of one freemium model (the current, based on speculators) with another freemium model (based on ads).
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That's a solid point, ultimately there's nothing from stopping a company from getting an account, making a post about their services and botting it up trending now I suppose. I'm very much interested in fining sustainable burn mechanisms for this blockchain and it feels like being told "wait for communities and SMTs and pray that steemit inc saves us" just doesn't sit right with me. The purpose of blockchain is decentralization obviously and maybe it's just really starting to sink in how centralized we actually are, because even if we create solutions and the top twenty witnesses are on board, we are essentially left with "fork or don't fork."
Lately I've been thinking a lot about what behavior on Steem supports sustainability (and the price of STEEM) and I ended up with curation. Curation could make people power up, which takes liquid STEEM out of circulation and decreases supply. But curation is broken and always has been - that's why we are trying to fix that at Steeve. But I will re-iterate these thoughts with burn on my mind, I totally forgot about this option. Thanks for bringing it up!
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Not sure it is as simple as that. I still think that promoting posts "artificially" is handy, particularly for new users. It is pretty hard to build up your list of followers without getting to Trending or Promoted, unless you are lucky enough to be resteemed by a Steem celebrity. So it is actually good for new users to be able to promote their post and get some attention. And IMO Promoted is way more clear than using bidbots...
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