You are right in saying everyone can choose what they want to use. But telling people "if you don't like it you can go somewhere else" is a very unwise policy for such a small project as Steem. Its still in its infancy and its survival is not even close to being assured, so it should hand-hold its userbase.
Also, DPOS does not have to go to the extreme Steem is taking it. For example, the HoboDAO intends on adding a Loom Network DPOS website to its long-term roadmap, but one's total amount of HBO will not give you wildly large votes over anyone else. The reason for this is that whales are a form of centralization and thus a security risk. Our aim is decentralized journalism, while whales with equal vote authority to stake get to have more opinion than the overall community, which makes no sense for a decentralized system. Its a contradiction in Steem's very purpose.
Uncapped influence based on how much you have staked leads to an all-or-nothing system. This is a problem because most people on social media sites are whimsical and that's just not likely to change. Where is Myspace? My point is that if a social media site demands large investment to get anything out of the deal that its a non-starter strategy.
Saying all that, allow me to make my key point for both the last comment and this one. I'm trying to explain that the market seems to be telling us that our rewarding system based on stake won't work, but that doesn't mean DPOS doesn't work. Resource credits are a brilliant idea and it makes perfect sense that SP stakers receive benefit through a delegation economy of RCs.
Perhaps the world will not accept the notion of whale/orca/minnow/plankton vote levels. We might need to make voting for the reward pool equal, however, the resource credit system can still compensate whales through a delegation market of RCs. The RC system is an excellent way to reward investors because they benefit from all the many communities that desire access to the Steem network.
People are claiming that SMTs will solve the disparity problem and downvoting harassment. I strongly disagree on both counts. The problem with SMTs is that they will almost always be practically worthless. STEEM/SBD will remain what people want because its a universal internet money, while most SMTs will be hardly better than wordpress token features that have been around for years. In order for a token to matter to anyone, it needs to either be useful in many places, or the one place that you can use it needs to be incredibly popular. And this is why the STEEM reward pool system needs to be palatable to more than just early investors like a common pump & dump project, but to billions of people.
Love the idea about the rc credits being and investment vehicle instead of stake based voting. This place would be a lot more fun with more equality of opportunity.
I understand your points and I think they make sense but I don’t actually understand the point of debating whether or not Delegated Proof of Stake, therefore stake based voting, is something Steem should do away with. I am saying it’s what STEEM is at its core. Not “if you don’t like it go somewhere else” more “you came to a DPOS platform, you can’t expect for it to be anything different than a DPOS platform.
This is why communities are so needed. Anyone can make their own economic policy and distribution etc through communities and SMTs while still being on the Steem chain.
I just think we tried it and its not working, that's essentially what I am saying. So, I am suggesting that we refocus toward an RC market incentive for investors and let the crowd employ the "wisdom of the crowd" approach for all content. It would be better than letting the ship sink in my opinion.
Lots of money in it too, think about how rich you are in RCs. Most people with even a small amount of SP have more resource credits than they need in a day. In the economic model I'm suggesting a community founder would have to rent your RCs from you in a dlease.io like site in order for this late arriver to Steem to be able to provide Steem access to his community members. Investors would love that idea, as they do with EOS. Its turning Steem integration into the shiny new thing that all community founders just got to have.
Oh, this community doesn't have Steem integrated? What a dump! I'm out...
Its the best of both worlds, because the stakers would become much like miners in this system, reaping the passive profits they want and providing a high SBD reward value due to all the money the whales have locked up in the network. In fact, EOS even markets this idea and tells people in its Coinbase course that owning just 1 EOS could in the future be enough to receive "space rent" from a dev team or entrepreneur.
That should be Steem's move toward communities, and it would even allow the users in those communities to feel the system is much more fair, because their votes would be relatively similar in value. In this version of Steem, RCs would be something the average user never even thinks about, because it would be like servers, just something the site administrators deal with. Do that and drop the inflation rate in half and you'll see the investors FOMO right on in...
Its not a wild idea, its exactly what EOS is doing right now and it is attractive to investors. Also, if you think carefully about the SMT concept, Steemit Inc.'s plan kind of is what I am suggesting, only, I am going as far as saying we should de-couple the reward pool from SP and not care about SMTS. The SMTs are nice and would be profitable to STEEM holders, but 90%+ of SMTS are going to be a joke and Steem Engine is already rocking that side of things. STEEM is where it is at, and its STEEM that communities will really want to earn because its universal currency.
I think he is a saying there could be a hi-bred approach like stake weighted voting at the level of Witnesses and Management.
Without allowing those with huge amounts of stake to control the content.
While I don't think that will ever happen with Steem, some of the SMT and community sites might take that approach. I happen to agree that our distibution combined with DPOS is a huge problem with wisdom of the crowd type curation, there is no crowd. There are a handful of account that can take something to the top of the curve or knock them out of visibility and they don't represent a middle line.
Agreed though, it is unlikely to happen, I don't mind that it gets brought up because there are ways to mitigate our distribution issues, even if we don't choose to implement them.
In fact although Palnet's distribution is still wanky, they at least don't have nearly the distribution problems Steem does and while it is still imperfect, it feel it has a better chance of succeeding than Steem based content sites.
Sometimes one wishes a comment were resteemable. This is one of those comments. Spot on analysis I wish everyone understood here.
If you are referring to my comment, thank you. :)