Hi everybody,

I am dealing with steemit for roughly a year now. Like most of you, I have ben fascinated with the central ideas  potential of steemit: Building up a social network that -like every other social network - is fully driven by the users. The exception is, that instead of companys earning the money that the content is worth, people delegate and vote up each other in order to reward themselves.

But after watching the development of steemit over the last year, I really lost the faith that steemit can ever reach a critical ammount of people participating. 

With this post - my last post - I wanted to share the main arguments that lead me to this opinion.

1. It grows too slow. 

Right now steemit has ~1 million accounts. That sounds like very many people but if you are taking a closer look, you can see that there are less than 100.000 people who actually use steemit every day. For a global acting social network, this is not very much and growing rates give no hope that this will change anytime soon.

I think that it will stay in the niche. Because of that - people who speculated and put money will lose patience and leave which will lead to the end of the project.
The fact that a power down takes two years will only stretch this effect - It can not save the system overall.

2. Design - Interface - Usability - no mobile -- It's ugly, complicated and the development is too slow

Let's face it: Steem is neither a user friendly site, nor a eye-catchy one. Everyone hopes that this is getting better but it is not. The speed at which the system gets developed is just too slow to compete. It is 2018 and crypto is no secret tip anymore. Most people who use the internet use it on smartphones - and  steemit is a pain in the ass if you just want to check in on it on mobile.

3. Everyone depends on WHALES

The fact that most of the capital is held by a few whales is the strongest argument that steemit will not have success in the long term. For me, the idea behind steemit and the idea why so many people believe in steemit is that is provides people with more power and independence from big companys. What happens on steem is, that everyone depends on WHALEs upvotes. 

If you happen to be lucky and get a upvote of 20 bucks or so, the dopamine rush is incredible and it obscures your mind.
If not, no matter how great your articles quality is - you just get a few cents.

This leads to the reality, that everyone tries to get whales attention. Attention. It is all about knowing how to get attention and not creating good quality postings.

On the bright side

But not everything is bad. For example I think that the idea of providing smart media tokens (see Appics project - It tackles my arguments concerning mobile) in the future has a lot of potential and I wish you all only the best