I'm struggling with my steem motivation at this very moment and somehow it feels good others being in doubt about certain aspects as well. The system is far from perfect. It has a lot of merits, but also a lot of flaws.

What we often fail to see is that there are more sides to rewards and we have no way of differentiating. IMHO the two can accumulate the same reward amount but for different reasons. Let's consider only decent content for a moment, compare a decent blog articles with decent zappl post. A blog reward can be 'high' because people want to reward the effort of writing/research/insights/... A zappl post could be reward equally if a lot more people gave small votes, because the zappl post has a greater audience.

The problem is that there are too many different categories and the system works the same for all. Steem has a system of 'content' and rewards. It's the community that decides how to reward what content.

That sounds good in theory but as this steem experiment shows a lot more is involved. Where there's money and people, there's greed and so we have minimal input for maximal output, circle jerks, bots, ...

One of the issues is that there's a utopian idea of content self governance. The fact is that SP (money) governs the content, for better or worse. It remains a fact that one person with enough money can buy in and influence what gets rewarded and what not. At the same time a thousand minnows can write the greatest content and only getting pennies if the money doesn't like them. It's so freaking complex and it will stay like this for a while.

At the moment it all makes me feel too negative to stay around. It's too much about the money and the money does not reflect the value as I see it. (Not speaking for myself, I've done decently, I mean generally)