RE: Whales upvoting chosen accounts crap for the rewards is one thing, attacking the rewards of a genuinely productive account is utter madness
random people
... from a very small group located in an isolated section of a forum 99.99% of the inhabitants of Earth (especially those who actually use social media) never knew existed.
I'm curious what the result of this "experiment" would have been had things been done differently from the beginning.
Perhaps instead of focusing on people who have no clue when it comes to social media and giving them all of the power (to destroy), the initial offering should have been posted in a more "social media" type environment.
Had the site been allowed to blossom with social media oriented members, instead of power hungry crypto-enthusiast (no offense to any of us), before the bootstrap I think we could have seen much more positive results.
Also I feel the economics of the platform was not fully tested prior to launch and due to that many changes have been thrown at the userbase repeatedly and we never know what the rules are from month to month.
It ends up being more of a site about game theory and how to maximize rewards against others instead of a group of people freely sharing information and the off chance of getting some tips for their post.
The atmosphere here is cutthroat compared to any other social media experience alive today. "Toxic" is the most oft-used word to describe Steemit from those who've left, and I tend to agree. The entire site is "toxic", not just a few individuals. The design invites it, hell encourages it to some point it seems.
Next time somebody launches a new blockchain they should give power to only a small group of people who can be trusted to work for the ecosystem until it is mature
By "random people" I mean people who just happen to be in right place in a right time. Better way would be to give tokens (or an opportunity to mine tokens) only for people who have clearly indicated that they are willing to commit for the project in the long term.
I'm not sure if that would have been any different.
My choice would have been to give power to the people who actively work for the blockchain and ecosystem. Basically something like the reward pool system that Bitshares has. Most of the money should be in the reward pool in the beginning and people would have to earn it by blogging or with worker proposals.
Well, for me this was pretty clear. Steem is totally new system, nothing like it has been existed before, so some parts of it are necessary to adjust along the way when we see how they actually work in the real world.
I've been thinking that it's not have been a good idea to promote the idea of "make money by blogging". It means that most people who come to the site want to make money, and if they don't, they complain and finally leave the platform telling everybody else how it sucks.
Better choice would be to market Steemit as noncensorable platform for people who actually need something like that. They don't care how much money they earn. They don't give a shit about little bugs. All they need is a place where they can communicate freely with the world. That would make much better userbase for Steem.
We might be able to steer the userbase to that direction by reducing author rewards and giving them to witnesses (who are underpaid currently).