Thanks, Raj:)
I think once those who have a lot of SP come to understand that 100 000 steem at 35 cents is worth far less than only 10 000 steem at even a modest $5, they might change their mind about empowering a larger proportion of steemians, especially those that make the blockchain the most attractive.
Likewise, a steemian can post just once a day and make a much larger payout if steem is valued higher than if they are posting 7 times a day for a fraction of the payout and only upvoting themselves. Unless they truly are posting nonsense, it is actually less work to read, comment, and upvote others then create several quality posts a day. Supporting other is not hardwork; it's fun and interesting and with it we could truly build an extraordinarly healthy and profitable block chain.
Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of them care so much, as steem is just one of many big bags of crypto they hold. One thing I noticed at steemfest 3 is that a certain amount of the very high SP holders I listened to talking were only interested in one thing; passively earning from their investment.
Hence why they're not interested in the long term over the short term.
I sat in on many conversations and observed like a diligent writer 😉
Many of these people are very big crypto bag holders. They're millionaire coders etc. Honestly, steem (as it should be working for maximum impact both financial and social) isn't where they should be if they want to be passive. This is why they game the system instead of putting the work in. They delegate, build vote buying services... and any other way they can find to automate ROI. These are the choices they make and these choices are killing steem's long term potential.
But that's only half the story. Often coders and Devs with big steem holdings aren't natural content producers so how do they get fair ROI? I'm sure that many of them feel that they're justified in running vote buying services or delegating to them. What needs to happen is a more positive alternative for the passive investment crowd. I hope that if curation is made more profitable, communities and curation entities will be able to make ROI through delegation to their manual curation efforts higher than any bots and this will kill bidbots, bringing about a virtuous cycle.
I'm currently using OCDB out of sheer frustration... But it's my hope that if this system I describe above came to pass @ocd and @acidyo would scrap the bot and simply return to curating and rewarding based on the old model. In this scenario I describe above curie, ocd and various communities would ensure that quality content gets noticed in a purely 'payout' sense and content creators would be incentivised to stay and improve the overall quality of steem through their content. While the passive investment crowd earned through return on the 50% curation rewards as well as hopefully trail-voting who they delegate to.
At the end of the day, 50% of a $15 post is still around $3-$4 more than I'm earning naturally from my posts at the moment and that's after nearly 2 years networking on steem. About half of that payout comes from curatorhulk, which belongs to theycallmedan, so when you consider that after 20 months of consistent content creation, networking and project/community involvement I'm getting around $1.5 organic payout on each post. This is both me moaning and using myself as an example as I know there are many (high quality) writers like me in the same boat. You're one of them Prydefoltz. I came here both to earn and for fun. I'm not gonna comment on if this was a realistic or sensible outlook 😉 but the reality is that the system as is now, will continue to drive people like me away. Further depleting the potential user-base and audience for real investors to flock to steem.
The biggest chance of success for steem allways has been, and remains; offering business an engaged, captive audience. Add into that the potential to incentivise an audience with votes (through staking rather than spending) and it's a powerful value incentive...but only if the audience is here... and remains here. With a large active, engaged audience the possibilities are endless.
P.s. I agree 100% with your logic about good behaviour leading to higher steem price and reputation. I'm just not sure some of the people with high SP necessarily care. In fact, I'm pretty sure some of them just use steem to leach value so they can sell that value out into the markets and play with that capital trading. It's up to us to remove the mechanism for that drain on the rewards pool without contributing something beyond perpetuating vote buying which is a mechanism that takes advantage of people's desperation and hope to be rewarded for there work.
Amen to that! I know my comment advice may sound cynical, but I'm still hopeful that steem can draw closer to what you describe above 🙂
Absolutely there is short selling going on with steem and including manipulating the price. But it needs to be understood that nothing is more passive in way of earning than watching the price of steem go up. It is the only scenario where we all win and a helluva a lot more.
To the bid bots, like buying votes on any other platform, and that happens let's be clear, a lot, my understanding is that it is less than a percent of all the votes. I am not sure what percent of the payout is filtered their way. And it is out in the open and people know when you are doing it, unlike the with centralized platforms like say facebook. And people are going to do it anyways, at least here there isn't the smoke and mirrors going on with other platforms. I wish they weren't there too but I am thankful for the SP reserve they maintain.
In the long run using them hurts the user and gives neither ROI or the increase in esteem of other steemians in a real sense. But I would not disallow them because we can't. They would just go back in the shadows.
An accurate view count would remediated most of the issues with them and help steemit and other sister apps grow and open room for blog operators to monetize their own work. Until human nature changes, I think it is best to allow the bidbots but to oversee them better and maybe 'tax' them a little to help the blockchain thrive. Sure you can operate a bidbot, any size you want, but a percentage of your VP goes to curating genuine quality posts through an app-run curating system.
There are lots of solutions but any choice we make should be about getting more eyes on the page.