This recent flagging activity has certainly opened my eyes as a content creator, focused solely on writing and sharing my thoughts. For Steemit to grow new money does indeed need to come in, so I see arguments made by investors and understand them more clearly, although I don't fully agree with them as a content creator.
Never forget that content creation is the source of Steem value in the first place, too. The blog aspect is what gives it value, and good blog content is essential to long-term success.
Content creation in steemit is somewhat analogous to mining in bitcoin. It is the means by which the new steem/bitcoin come in to existence.
Early on in steemit (for the first weeks or month) almost any post could earn you a large reward. Early on in bitcoin almost any little laptop doing the mining could earn you a reward in bitcoin.
That soon changed. It now takes a huge investment in equipment to earn any bitcoin at all. And it takes a lot of effort, strategizing, netorking, and, yes, luck, to earn significant steem.
This platform is an experimental hybrid of cryptocurrency and social media. No one knows how it will turn out.
Will the value of comments always be small? Maybe in the future you can make significant steem by piggybacking off popular posts with good comments.
And without quality content to interact with, it would be very difficult to persuade the next content creator from elsewhere to sign up and become part of the community.
I used to do mining for crypto currencies. And I do post and curate on steemit. It may be true that some types of content creators will leave, just as some miners (me for example) left crypto mining. But others with different skills/motivations will replace them.
Peoples' agttention can be attracted by other things than content creation to interact with. I hope that doesn't happen, but it is surely possible.
It depends how you define value.
What makes Steem different from the thousands of other altcoins on the market? What new utility does it bring that makes it useful in a unique way? That is what average people need to find valuable in a coin. For Steem, it is a blog where the coin can add weight to your vote. That is what keeps it from being just another forgotten coin worth a couple Satoshi. And it is the creators of content who support that.
The content attracts readers and more content creators, but unless they invest in Steem financially, they don't add to the reward pool, as far as I understand it.
The financial investors are symbiotically connected to the content creators who invest time and effort into creating the ecosystem that drives the market value. Without content and community, your investment falls to zero. We drive the demand that creates a price. If you cannot see this, you are blind. But don't worry. I can sell you an authentic Steem Pope indulgence for a mere 100 SBD to absolve your sins against Blog. :D
I see that, but I also see that, as @rhondak pointed out, both creators and investors are needed. One without the other adds little value.
Thus the word "symbiotic."
Then we are in agreement ;-)
I think this might not actually be true, and we can prove it by looking around.
We know that social networks work. They function. Social media is one of the big killer apps of the decade and possibly longer. All of those social media operations have existed without some sort of blockchain-supported currency and done extremely well. There's a reason that everyone will compare your social media platform to Twitter, Facebook, and even smaller operations like Gab and Medium.
All of those were established well before forms of creator compensation were considered useful to add to extant social media platforms, and flourished.
Investors in STEEM? Without the backing of creators who are actually engaging in making content which will draw people to the platform in order to engage?
They are just people who have thrown money at their screen and look disgruntled when it doesn't magically reproduce.
Investors really aren't needed. Even if STEEM had no backing or connection to fiat currencies, it would still be a mechanism (albeit a deeply flawed and problematic one) for helping rank and sort content being created for potential quality.
Creators literally are the value of STEEM. And in the context of Steemit as a platform, they are the only revenue generators for STEEM. The rest is just bots talking to each other, passing around tokens that don't really mean anything and have no context.
Frankly, I consider that a problem. Other people, clearly, feel differently.
Good ☺☺
You realize this sort of comment, along with your other one, is likely to earn you a flag? Comment in a fashion that interacts intelligently with either the original poster or the person whose comment you reply to. Otherwise you are comment spamming and people will flag you.