RE: What will it take for Steem to reach "the masses"?
I think the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption is the "crypto is a scam" narrative. A lot of people believe it is, or worry that it might be, so they steer clear. I'm not really sure how you can measure whether something is or isn't a scam, but if there was some technical way to assess scammishness and Steem doesn't score highly then that might be beneficial.
A naive solution to this imbalance is to increase the curation percentage to 65% or 75%.
Putting aside the >$1 SBD issue, I think high curation rates contribute to a rich-get-richer dynamic. For long term health I think a currency needs a wide distribution, but the narrow self-interest of large stakeholders is to focus on passive incomes and guaranteed returns which I think works against a healthier distribution.
Maybe, but it would also reduce the incentive for overzealous self-voting, which contributes to the same sort of dynamic.
I wonder if it would be possible to make it a witness-defined parameter so that the witnesses could set different levels and try to find the best balance... The more complicated the change, the less likely it is to be implemented, though.
Update: I forgot to reply to your first point. I totally agree that fear of crypto being a scam is a big factor. How to measure scammishness is an interesting question in order to reassure possible users and investors is an interesting question.
I think self-voting is a bad idea. It should probably be made impossible at the chain level, and then de facto self-voting with other accounts under a person's control should be considered a form of abuse. In mainstream social media it's usually considered gauche to like/upvote your own content, and the monetary element of an upvote here tends to make it look even more slimy. Leaving whether or not self-voting is acceptable to ambiguous social dynamics was bad decision early on, in my opinion.
To me, the problem to avoid is overvaluing a post. If a post is overvalued, then it reflects a problem with the ranking system. I don't care if it got that way through self-votes, bidbots, or any other mechanism. Likewise, if the post is valued reasonably, I also don't care if it got its value from a bidbot or self-vote. I'm just interested in the end result.
The problem I see with self-voting (and bidbots) is when people write a 5 cent post, and they know it's a 5 cent post, but they vote it up to 50 dollars. That's the main scenario that led me to list improved post ranking as the first of my suggestions.
I think the original vision of steem had a significant "wisdom of crowds" element in post evaluation, but that model doesn't seem to work that well when post valuations are dominated by large-stakeholder votes. There's a tension between saying the value-proposition of holding Steem Power is that you get a say in what is or isn't valued, and the long-term value of the post-rankings mapping to something that seems to make sense to "normies". If there was a large population independently voting with somewhat comparable stakes we'd probably be in a different environment. Our current reality is a small population where most people's votes barely register and a few have huge influence.
I think it makes sense to think of over- or undervaluing a post as a negative externality like pollution -- it undermines the credibility of the platform. Good stuff not getting rewarded leads to people thinking there's no point in trying to post good stuff, bad stuff getting rewarded makes people think they're likely to get a raw deal.
Agreed. I think the original idea was for posts to "bubble up", but it's never really worked out that way because larger stakeholders lose out on curation rewards that way, so they prefer to vote at the front of the line. I think the piece that some large stakeholders might be missing is that their stake gets more valuable if they can encourage investment by helping the smaller curators to increase their rewards.
It seems like Steemit and one or two witnesses probably get that, but some of the "smaller" big stakeholders - not so much.
I think there might be a tragedy-of-the-commons thing happening where the optimal long-term collective action is to grow the value of the ecosystem, but it's easy for each individual to prioritize short-term value extraction while expecting somebody else to do the work to cultivate growth.
You may be right. I definitely think there's a tragedy of the commons dynamic in play with posting abuse for some authors who don't have any substantial skin in the game. With curators, there's a counterbalance, because people with more stake have a bigger motive to protect it, but some of the same incentives are still in play.