The Trouble with Steem...

I love the idea of Steemit at first, but the more I fiddle with it and get to understand how it works the more I realize that it is not beneficial to use to the full. It has its uses, but they are very limited and Steemit just is not what it could be or should be if we are going to see it as this future of the web and digital social interactions.

First, it's not a young America dream for the non-financially invested. If you don't spend much, you won't get much. YouTube offered much more profit potential initially. But do the people that spend get much? Writers are getting ripped, very hard. The Steem blockchain locks us in for over three months, we lose 9.5% of the value of our SP every year and Steem dilutes at 100% every year and that is a big problem. We are paying to contribute to the network and not REALLY being paid to contribute to the network, although that is what it FEELS like is happening.

Steemit sometimes feels like you're in the Stepford Wives story because you are surrounded by bots and often wonder if you are the only actual person there. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies are a confusion of sectors, including both money hungry capitalists and institution hating anarchists, both alt-right and loud Trump blasters, I personally just really hate Facebook. Maybe that is part of the beauty of it all and maybe that is worth it to lose our money through the slow and agonizing attrition of the Steem engine. But is there profit here, somehow?

Rest a moment and check this out!

And we're back...

There is, although it is kind of super facebook-ish in design and is not that useful now. I would say that if you were trying to create an ICO the Steemit community would be a wonderful place to do that. You can promote your posts for relatively cheap and get visibility, although that visibility is not incredibly valuable because we're still a rather small community. Hey, I'm fine with a little growing pains, but I am concerned if we can actually profit here or just be slowly drained to the benefit of the originators.

The inflation issue got handled by going from 10% to 9.5%, which just wasn't a solution. We don't want to just lose 0.5% less than we did before, in fact, we don't want to lose at all. I understand the idea of limitless supply over time, I do, but it has to go through a bottle neck for the sake of balance and profitability for those laying the foundation here. The argument that the masses will flood in and that will fix everything isn't a solution either, because that is what we call a pyramid scheme. At some point we'll get hurt from that and there will be resounding community hatred for the ones that earned from the deal. Nobody whens in those situations, not in the long term.

I'm not saying we should change the Steem design to open the doors to aristocracy, I'm saying that it already is extreme aristocracy wherein only the super rich are able to bear the hit of the inflation by making several times the numbers, which is just out of reach for the rest of us.

I love the idea of Steem moving forward, but if it is really going to be a shepherd of the people and not what picks at our bones as we flee from Google and Facebook, then we need to make some serious structural changes. I love what JSECoin is doing, I think our readers should be the source of securing the network and our content creators should earn from that. We don't have to have a hard cap, but why not decade caps for longevity and profitability?

On another note, I hate advertising, don't you? Yeah...

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