Great post, my friend. This is an epic ramble-rant and as usual, you're right on point. The one additional thought I would add is that I hate worrying about money. We all do. To have a system that incentivizes so much good behavior is wonderful, because I spend most of my time mentoring and working with others now, and I'm able to forget the money part for a while. But when I turn around, it just so happens that those cryptocapitalist motives are aligned with the work of building Steemit and making it function more effectively for everyone.
Finally, you're right that curation is rapidly improving Steemit. None of us is getting rich on it; I've paid out more than I've taken in to help create Project Curie. It's about making something better and hopefully we all profit from that in the long run. Let's hope they don't make some dumb decisions and turn back the clock to about 1917. Communism wasn't much of a success and it would hurt us here, too.
Exactly, self interest isn't just about making a quick buck; that's where Capitalism has failed us, by promoting the short term over the long. Quarterly reports and looking at new ventures for 3 years, are just two capitalist traits that promote short term thinking over long term.
When we give our children good advice, sometimes we know they aren't going to need that advice for years; we still give it to them though, this is how we should treat Steemit.
Cg
Isn't the quarterly stuff due to some US (tax) laws or something? In Germany "capitalists" are criticising that and being short-sighted is not inherently capitalist, it's just being short-sighted.
To me, true "long term capitalism" is always having win-win-situations in mind when doing business, because you simply can't fool people indefinitively. And as an anarchocapitalist in the "austrian" tradition, I blame the government for destroying the time-preference structure. People tend to try to get as much as they can as quick as they can, because people feel the ship is sinking soon anyway, so why care for the long term?
My impression is, that this phenomenon is worse in the US, but I don't know why. The "worst" (as in short-sighted and ruthless and dishonest) salespeople I've met in my life where Americans. On the other hand, the brightest and most visionary entrepreneurs I met are Americans as well. So maybe the US is just more extreme on both sides?