RE: Announcing Steemit's New Delegation Application Process
In addition, the critical situation of Steem causes that few people want to spend Steem, they prefer to sell on Bitcoins.
This will continue to be the case as long as we are giving away a majority of the inflated tokens to people who do not need to invest. Right now, there is not only a problem with the amount of tokens flowing out of the system, there's a problem with there not being any reason to hold SP except to earn curation rewards. But as the price continues to fall for a variety of reasons, the risk of powering up and holding those STEEM tokens is too high, even if you can earn a 20% annual return.
With Steemit's plan to delegate (which dilutes stakeholder influence and reduces their ability to earn with SP) and their plan to continue the programmatic selling of STEEM (which puts consistent and predictable negative pressure on prices), it'll be hard to find new buyers and to retain current stakeholders.
The problem is stake-weighting VP, because it allows the extraction of the majority of the rewards, and prevents that value from inuring to the Steem price by creating more demand, as it would if it was reaching the content creators. The media payout is .01 SBD, and the average payout is ~15 times that, revealing that a couple dozen whales are extracting more than an order of magnitude more than the entire rest of the community.
Wanna grow the price of Steem? Grow the market, not the wallets of whales. ROI from extracting the funds from the marketing division of Steem directly discourages ROI from capital gains, and that's the problem that has not been addressed by any HF. HF21 halves author rewards, doubles curation rewards, and gives the whales another tool to increase their ROI too: the downvote pool. Every time whales flag rewards back into the pool, they get another run at it and extract ~90% of it.
Until stake-weighted VP is no longer is able to extract the rewards that create interest in Steem in new users that grow the market for Steem, capital gains will remain elusive. Profiteers are not investors. They are a plague.
Well, in my opinion, there are plenty of reasons for Steem's problems.
I started to wonder if there are (and what) alternatives to Steem. There are a lot of them, but I was most interested in ActivityPub protocol and the biggest interface - Mastodon.
That's why in 2016 (October) the Mastodon project was created, which today has 4 million users and 500k - 1m of active users.
My observations:
Especially the third point is the most important in my opinion. Programmers, server administrators, developers are most often nerds. But do we have these nerds on Steem?
There are always a few of them, but most of them are gone. Steem from the plankton / minnow side is a difficult network. Somebody may not like your post and give you a flag. You can create a project and devote a lot of time to it, but if you don't have good relations with whales, it won't succeed.
I have an online store project on Steem. A lot of people say it's the best application on Steem. I believe it is, but what if it's losing out because of price drops? I have to either invest in Bidbot (which will probably never pay for itself) or try to achieve something by being a small, meaningless project.
Some people say that it's over and they don't care about Steem anymore.
I personally am shocked by the development of projects in the Lightning network. There are a lot of nerds in Bitcoin!