I don't think it's a surprise to any of you that I've been missing my enthusiasm for Steem since the debacle that was Hardfork 20. Few of the philosophical issues raised by the hard fork process have been addressed, and instead the top witnesses are spending their time once again returning to the idea of 50% curation rewards, something that I feel exacerbates the primary issues with Steem rather than alleviating them.

The Mesopotamians was founded to use my stake to work on what I then saw, and still see, as the primary flaws in the Steem ecosystem:

• Vastly unequal stake distribution, particularly the small number of users with psychologically meaningful votes.
• Lack of user acquisition and retention programs that weren't pay-to-play.
• Disinterest from the current generation of Steem leadership in encouraging the development of the next generation.

These aren't problems that need giant, system-wide changes to put into practice, and Steem seemed like a welcoming place to put them into practice. The novel rewards system here gave me the opportunity to build something to accomplish those goals, while maybe making a little money at the same time.

I'll refer to an infographic I made for a post that never ended up happening, describing the rewards flow between populations on Steem:

Holders refers to all Steem that isn't used for upvoting: cash, idle accounts, downvoting initiatives. All that Steem still is used to generate rewards, and those rewards go to the two categories of active users.

Miners are the people whose goal is to extract value from the system. They pass their own stake around to each other, take their share of the extra rewards from the inactives, and leak a little bit of value to the participants from inefficiencies in things like vote-buying systems.

Participants are the core players on Steem. They're the people who interact with each other, vote because they like things, post to communicate, and so one. The Mesopotamians were selected to be intense participants, current and future leaders of that community.

I believe that Steem's success comes primarily from growing the number and the collective voting power of those users in blue. That's what this system was designed to enhance. But I'm no longer convinced it can be effective.

There are lots of things that make me feel this way. Blockchain developers have demonstrated that they don't care to consider user experience in their process. When Dlive lost its big delegation, that didn't go to someone that could support users, it went to Oracle-D, whose sole purpose is to pump the Steem price. Andrarchy has been showing signs that Steemit Inc. is desperate for a price pump, and quite a few users have been doing the same. The people whose input I relied on to develop these priorities have largely de-prioritized them in favor of looking for reasons for a higher price. High-stake users are rebuilding the system willy-nilly because they're convinced it's so broken they "might as well just try something" even though they're unconcerned with the problems I outlined above.

I've seen what happens when companies start making decisions in hopes of raising the stock price instead of any deeper strategy, and it's not pretty.

But the key for me at the moment is that the switch to 50% curation rewards has been gaining momentum. This is a change that actively works against the goals above.

50% curation would benefit the profitability of The Mesopotamians quite a bit. We're currently making in the neighborhood of 3% annual return, adjusted for inflation. 50% curation would jump that all the way up to the 15% range.

But percentages aren't everything. The difference between 25 Steem a week and 50 Steem a week isn't really all that significant. The return from this program comes when this generation of users become dolphins, find it a worthwhile way to build the next generation of leadership, and support it with their stake. And so on, recursively, into greater generations and greater user numbers. The Mesopotamians is built to succeed if and only if we can generate a significant stakeholding userbase. It's also built to try to make that happen.

Under 50% curation, our "dolphin machine" is slowed substantially. The time between each generation becomes longer, and since it's an exponential process, that means that at the long time-horizon of the program, it removes large numbers of Mesopotamian graduates from the userbase. Which means less leadership for Steem, and also less financial security for The Mesopotamians. Neither of these are things I think we can afford.

That difference is enough to make me lean towards canceling the project entirely. If it's going to happen, now is clearly the time to do it; I'm in a position to return some of the support we've received from outside sources, the one delegation we're leasing is ending soon, and this is basically the last moment when unwinding things is going to be relatively easy.

It seems to me that I have several options here, and I'm going to lay them out for discussion. Feel free to add new ones too, if you see something I don't.

1. Maintain things as they are. Lease delegation to grow the program as planned, and basically operate under the assumption that the Steem development process is so broken that it won't be changed to hurt us anytime soon, and hope somehow that either it never does or we make enough progress in that time to be worth something.
2. Change the development path to turn it into a passive system for me. No more curation posts, no more level-up projects. Just an automatic Steem growth encourager. If I'm not spending much time on it, the returns don't look so bad, but it's much less compelling that way.
3. Move to a different Graphene-based system with less-toxic leadership, probably Whaleshares. I still like the Graphene magic math, and what I've seen of that community indicates that stakeholders are actively looking to build leadership in the next generation. The best argument against moving to Whaleshares is that they don't really need it. (The second-best is that they're just going to have similar issues later.)
4. Stop, cash out, and buy myself a vibraphone and a new couch. Part of why this is appealing is that winter is coming, and winter is like that, but honestly being significantly less invested here has a pretty strong appeal.

We're getting to the point where the best argument people can come up with to stay and build things on Steem is that the price might eventually moon, and one, that's not a good thing to base decisions on, and two, I don't think that's very likely anytime soon. The way Steem looks more and more desperate every day is not appealing.

If this program were just me, I'd be ending it tonight, playing around on Whaleshares for a while, and maybe developing something there if at some point I had a good idea and the price became attractive. But it isn't just me, it's made up of a lot of different users, who have their own stake in things, and those users need to have a chance to have their voices heard. So do our supporters. So, the comments to this post, folks. I'd like to hear what you think.

Include your Whaleshares username in the comments either way; I need more people to vote for there.