What do you think?
Many people who are here probably use Steem as a source of "income" to fund their other crypto ventures. As long as crypto is still seem as some questionable magical beans, real people won't be coming here in droves.
Look at all the bot farms, bidders, etc. Steem is just a "poor man's mining rig". You click and earn. You get some money to ask bots to provide "more money", which is really just inflation that devalues everyone else's stake.
Then, you sell it before everyone else does so you make profits while others suffer depreciation in their Steem wallets.
Let's not get started on the most inept stakeholder of them all: STINC.
They don't market. They don't set the tone. They don't lay down ground rules with their massive stake for years. But, they have no problem playing the "shadow puppet master" who still want to influence the politics, hard forks, etc.
Their delegations have a history of massive abuse. Abusers were never held accountable. You have projects that are nothing more than giant Steem mining pools. Those projects don't generate revenue. They don't have real business models. They are just there...mining Steem. It's funny because Trevon James uses that mining term a lot.
Back to the bots, they are the same thing: mining pools. STINC manages to approve tens of thousands of accounts for faucet farmers, but real users have to wait. It's so hard to create means to delegate RC, apparently. So, they are left with leasing out 15 SP per farm account. It makes you wonder if they are the ones operating those voting farms.
How about the promotional services? Very few of them even attempt to check what they are voting. They are basically "lawful" mining pools run by some known names on the platform. Take the silence from @therising or @rocky1, for example. They don't care. They pretend they don't see or hear you. But, if people are complaining they didn't get a vote after paying, you bet your ass they will jump right on it.
And Danite whales like @freedom doesn't care. They are here to reap quickly and retire early. It was never about any long term investment. It was about being able to mine as many shitcoins as possible and keep cashing out until it's no longer sustainable.
Those bots that do not discriminate on what they support are contributing to making Steem worse. There are persistent abusers who just keep pumping up junk posts to take a little profit each time. SFR has to expend a lot of effort to cancel their profit, but the bots just get richer and more powerful.
I hate to see the potential of Steem being wasted.