Agree, with basically one exception. The 4 post-per-day soft limit on the blockchain did not exist in the original design and was added in a hasty response to spam. It is inherently tuned for blogging ("no one should post more than 4 blog posts or they are spamming"). We now have other tools to fight spamming (including unfollowing people who spam).
This fixed limit is completely inappropriate for tweet-like content, photo sharing, status updates or other forms of more social and interactive content (including models we can't even think of right now). There is a twitter-like platform developed as a third party app which uses comments to hold content as a work around, but this causes a number of other serious problems.
The 4-post limit should be removed allowing the blockchain to be content-type neutral. This opens the door to a wide variety of interfaces and concepts to be built on top of the blockchain without restriction, and hopefully one or more will find the magic formula to attract a wide audience that steemit.com currently lacks.
YES! This is probably the number one thing they could do to encourage the typical social media user to join and contribute. Or, at the least, allow for additional short comments. I've wanted to post short things a few times, but ran up against that limit and hesitated to compete against my own longer posts. I will say, they have done something that no other platform has done this quickly, amass a lot of long form content, which is great search engine fodder, once it's mapped. but it probably needs to be categorized better, also. I helped build content for Ehow and they kicked ass in the search market, for about two years, you couldn't look for how to anything without finding Ehow.
That's an important point to be made. It actually would pose restrictions for new platforms. Perhaps dan and ned need to make spamming restrictions more of a front end feature so that it doesn't interfere with the steem blockchain.
I thought 'spamming' involved trying to use the platform to solicit business, advertise outside business etc. .... To my mind that is what this is
https://steemit.com/finance/@dollarvigilante/warren-buffett-is-the-latest-billionaire-to-jump-ship-from-the-markets
The last couple of paragraphs are blatantly advertising a subscription service for investment advice. I do not feel very strongly about this, but would like clarity? i would love to punt for business under Travel for my Cape Town Tours {grin}
Speaking generally here, advertising is not the same as spamming. Spamming implies some sort of high volume and distributing the spam widely to people who don't want it. Advertising is not disallowed and in fact is one of the use cases for SP (those wishing to promote their content can buy SP and use it to vote up their own posts).
On the other hand, if you don't like seeing someone's advertisements, you should unfollow them or mute them. If it is posted with inappropriate tags or otherwise attempts to unfairly gain visibility, then downvoting it is appropriate.
Hokay, got it! thanks for the comprehensive answer . I have no problem with the content, in fact I enjoy his posts..was just seeking clarity.