I don't disagree with you, but I think the dynamics are a bit different here than on almost any other site you go to. Steemit as it currently exists is not a content driven platform. I've been here for going on three years now and we've been trying to progress to that point for a long time, but the problem I see is that the people with the most invested (mainly due to the ninjamine) don't see the big picture. I'm not saying all of this to be negative, just to point out some of the facts as I see it. Most don't want to stop draining the reward pool for their own benefit to actually increase the value of the platform as a whole. Ultimately that doesn't matter though and here's why.
We need killer dapps and front ends that utilize different methods to create value and basically doing the things that we aren't currently able to do on the base layer of STEEM. Once bidbots got introduced people stopped using the burn mechanics to promote posts as bidbot owners sold them on the illusion that they are just promoting and paying themselves with their own money and it's win win, but it's not. Essentially bidbot owners just bypass the 7 day waiting period to cash out on their ability to upvote farm themselves without having to make shitposts or comment farms. Different frontends will be able to break away from using STEEM and SBD and create their own tokens/SMTs (hopefully) that have value and proper usecases to fix the problems that Steemit will never fix.
Imagine if Twitter for example ran on the STEEM blockchain and all of their advertisements and promoted content were paid for with a token, we'll call it TWIT for this example. Twitter could then find a proper balance to award authors and curators to actually make a content driven platform and the value of the token would come from the companies that are buying it off the exchanges to promote on Twitter. Obviously content is king and is what drives people to the platform. Not everyone is being followed by millions of people and not everyone gets millions of retweets, but the people that are should be getting the highest distribution of author rewards and the people curating and commenting could be rewarded proportionately as well.
Essentially any social media could adopt this concept. Burning tokens increases the scarcity and counters the inflation being paid out to authors and curators. The tokens get decentralized by getting it in the hands of as many people as possible, which increases the value as well. As long as 1% of the "users," which are really more stakeholders than anything, holds 95% + of the STEEM on the platform it's not going to change unless they do. So instead, we build something better on top of the platform that operates independent of the standard protocol and creates a meaningful and mutually beneficial store of value.
I see things like SMT essential for creating/experimenting with new token economies. The Steem project that gets advertising right with a proper burn/reward model will be that killer dapp. I see SMTs essential for scaling, having thousands of dapps all using just the Steem token would dilute the reward pool for each site. I have my idea of Steem being that upvote for the internet, accepted everywhere. So you can still upvote on these sites using your Steem power but you would get rewarded in TWIT token or what have you. All all the tokens tradeable against Steem. That is the dream. Things like Steem Engine can then build projects that don't need the SMT features, for other use case dapps that benefit from having a large active community. With all that said, I still believe having the large upvote, that can be used everywhere to earn various tokens that are built on Steem, would be the ideal route. This is up to the project creators to go this route but this is what I am building towards and these are the types of projects I will support.
It sounds like we mostly see things the same way, the only difference is probably that I see STEEM as more of a "fuel" or "resource" that's required to run these other dapps or intermediary tools to tokenize other sites.
Essentially if everyone likes going to the mall and interacting or spending their money there, STEEM is the transit system that most end users don't really put that much thought into and as long as it's working they never need to. The value of STEEM is inherent to the simple fact that it's required to keep things running, so successful dapps are going to need to be holding large amounts of STEEM to do business, but it's kind of irrelevant if their users ever hear of anything beyond TWIT or whatever token they are using.
I do like the idea of STEEM being the token that all of these are traded against and that is one of the things I remember stressing to aggroed over and over again when discussing the concept that eventually became steem-engine. Thanks for the insight, I just wish we had more investors with this mindset from the get go, but all things in due time. Happy to have you here!
You give great input and it helps me think, so glad to have you here as well! I believe, in a world where Twitter runs on Steem, that Steem will be so scare a resource that 99% of Twitter users will only have TWIT in their wallets. Of course, TWIT is the "Steem Power" of TWIT and does all the things Steem does on Steemit, for example. In the world where Steem becomes that backbone, most users won't have the luxury of being able to own much Steem because it would be mainly used up by developers as sort of a virtual real estate. And those that are lucky to have some Steem Power they want to upvote with, well just like gold it is as good as money, universally.
Seems like you and many others like @stephenkendal are thinking alike... #steemtwitter
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Nice, that's one of the things I love about this place, the exchange of ideas. I love the idea of using steem like the gas of the network or RC's, just have to be careful not to kill new dApps off like the HF did with new users. It would encourage investment in the platform from the dApp owners though, requiring them to at least put a little more skin in the game for their app other than just hosting services and a frontend. It would require at least some investment into the backbone of the system, the larger they scale their app the more investment required. It would take a lot of users and dApps to make it like gold, but it's definitely possible. Working a mechanism into the SMT's to burn some steem might stem some of the inflation issues, it could be something as simple as the promoted section used to be. When an advertiser on a dApp paid for an ad, burn a portion of it. Just a thought that hit while skimming through...
There is a Tweet token on the TRON Network..... I have a few million of them to had out.