Nice livestream. Honestly, it’s about a year and a half overdue but I applaud you for finally being a little more direct and honest while addressing the entire community.

You’ve finally illustrated to content creators like me what steemit has been doing and why things are the way they are now. I’ve never been a huge fan of @ned bashing despite being pretty underwhelmed with the evolution of steem and steemit since I joined around a year and a half ago.

I am a bit confused about your statement that the fair distribution of rewards based on quality content was an afterthought. This sentiment certainly explains the overemphasis on dapps and lack of attention given to keeping a strong community of quality intent creators...but then what is proof of brain and why is it important? You say you wanted to help as many people as people get involved in this space, and start with an app like steemit...how did you originally envision the rewards being distributed then?

I appreciate your insistence that communities matter to you and after a year doubting this, I finally believe you. The only problem is that the fair distribution of rewards based on quality content was your greatest tool for gathering and empowering such communities and its fallen apart. Obviously what is fair and what is quality is flexible and algorithms are not perfect but if you really care about community you would have done a lot more to foster community by putting dapps and content creators at the same level.

If you want dapps to take on that role that’s fine, but then providing the dapps with massive delegation allowed them to create communities based on a sentiment of “oh, I’ll use this app cause they give me big upvotes if I use them”. This is not how you build community, this is how you appeal to opportunism and create a poor distribution of wealth. If you didn’t want a content based community, steemit.com was a mistake.

You had your best shot at building communities and empowering them with the promise of rewards for quality content, the communities (and dapps) would have formed naturally around that. You blew it. The way SP is distributed now leaves no room for the healthy growth of communities.

I think your proposed solutions aren’t the best chance you have but I don’t share the same kind of blind faith in the integrity of free market competition. Good luck. I’ll be spreading my attention to different blockchains (including Steem) and slowly focusing on the one that is distributing the reward pool in the most effective way to encourage quality development AND quality content.

I hope you pull things together. You’ve opened up a world of potential. It would suck to have it fall apart