It is difficult to describe how much your words here grated on my soul lol. And this despite knowing instantly they were sarcasm, only because I know they are actually serious arguments put forward by folks that don't grasp what investment really is, and how it works.

For untold thousands of years - not even joking - investors have underwritten projects in order to increase their wealth and power by increasing the value of the investment vehicle. Money is not actually necessary, but it is both an easier mechanism to enable investment, and increases the complexity of potential investment mechanisms. History reveals that investment undertaken in this way is beneficial to almost all affected parties, from the investor, to society in general. There are ways in which certain classes of parties are harmed by rational investment, but this is due to competition, and it is competitors that are harmed by being noncompetitive with competent investment.

Steem but little enables actual investment, as the devs that created it weren't competent investors, but good coders. There are many ways to profit that aren't due to actual investing, and the hostile buyouts and dismantling of profitable companies that became notorious in the 1980s exemplify profiteering as opposed to investment. IMHO, a great deal of the downwards pressure on Steem price is because the curation and author rewards were poorly devised to create incentive to invest rather than extract profits. The two directly oppose each the other in creating pressure on the price of the investment vehicle.

One of my last posts before the busy season (I work construction) overwhelmed me was regarding restructuring rewards mechanisms to create incentive to invest rather than extract resources from Steem. From an investment standpoint, rewards are the marketing mechanism that grows the market for Steem, and both author rewards and curation rewards were intended to create incentive to create quality content that attracted consumers to Steem. When self votes, circle jerks, bidbots, and etc., instead extract those incentives as rent on their stakes, instead of attracting potential investors to Steem, they do the opposite, and repel folks that are capable of increasing the quantity and quality of the content available on the blockchain.

What I proposed was decreasing the incentive to extract rewards by such manipulation of the marketing mechanism, and increase the incentive to fund development of apps and the Steem blockchain itself, using the nascent foundation and DAO that is being created to fund development. Since there is no extant mechanism to provide investors ROI other than capital gains, which have been shown to be beyond the understanding of many substantial stakeholders, I proposed creating a dividend stream from delegations and direct provision of funds underwriting development via the DAO.

Since the potential rewards for posts and comments are unlimited, and based on the stake of the voters, rewards have largely inured to rentiers through self votes and the aforementioned mechanisms, rather than to creators of content. Were rewards limited to a range typical of that availed to actual creators, incentive to game rewards and extract those funds intended to create capital gains would be eliminated, while creators would not be negatively impacted by the change. As an example of how this could be effected via simple algorithmic mechanism, I used the income proposals of Huey Long, a Great Depression era Louisiana populist assassinated because his proposals threatened the banksters profiteering from the economic hardship suffered by most people at the time. He said that no one needed more than thrice the median income, nor suffer less than 3% of it from their livelihood, and the circumstances of the day made that a very attractive proposition.

In comment to @kevinwong I provided examples using data posted by @arcange of how that would achieve the goal of eliminating financial incentive to extract rewards necessary to market Steem. @arcange's data also shows how little incentive profiteers are leaving on the table to attract creators to the platform, and make it pretty obvious why Steem underperforms the broader market as a result.

The fact is that given the blatant incentive to extract rent via selfvotes etc., there is very little incentive to invest as capital gains are unlikely to result from Steem as long as potential investors observe the rampant profiteering ongoing. Curation rewards aren't actually incentive to curate at all, but merely increase the ROI that can be achieved by profiteering. Very few people receive much in the way of curation rewards, and simply ignore them when they upvote for other rewards (social metrics other than financial, which are actually far more valuable than money). Only by ignoring content quality and maximizing mere financial concerns can curation rewards be a substantial incentive to upvote content, and doing that completely obviates the purpose of curation, which is to prefer quality content over lesser product.

Curation rewards are directly counterproductive as presently effected, and simply increasing them only exacerbates that problem - but rentiers want to make the problem worse, because that's their business model.

We need to change the business model from profiteering to investing. I reckon my proposal would do that, without decreasing the profit potential from powering up stake. It would seem to be a win win, but change threatens the status quo, and the status quo is falsely considered beneficial by rentiers. Long ago I posted voluminously on how capital gains were a far more potentially rewarding mechanism (during the BTC moon) than rewards pool rape, but few competent investors are on Steem to begin with, so these posts produce little effect.

Until these truths are grasped by substantial stakeholders, which is probably only possible by experiencing the results of not knowing them (and the destruction of Steem as that learning experience) there seems to be little chance actual investment will be encouraged or extractive profiteering discouraged. Time will tell. Frankly, it already has, as investors continue to not flock here.

Thanks!