RE: Why do I think that steemit will fail?
Yet as a beta experiment I think it is doing well. People are responsible for voting for good content. If people start voting for selfies or similar useless memes and jokes, steemit could fail. One way the developers addressed this is to limit the number of posts per day to 4 instead of the mass posting that was happening. They are trying things out and I give them credit. The people heavily invested here realize that if steemit is no different than any other social media platform it will lose what makes it special. It's so new that a week from now, a month, or a year are hard to predict what might happen. Could celebrities overtake it and drive away people who post quality and can't compete with celebrities to get their content heard? Will the steem price rise or fall, or what other features will be added. The steemit whitepaper is an excellent source of the minds behind the scenes. Those with millions of dollars invested cannot afford to have crap covering up other great content. They have a vested interest in all users and I don't believe it is simply a monetary goal. It would be cool if @ned or @dan could post weekly updates about some things going on in steemit and some of the best posts and what users could vote on to make steemit a place everyone can enjoy for a long time.
You got my vote, but still a long plan of action must be put in place. Steemit passes 25,000 users last week if i'm right and most of them unfortunately registered here just for the money. I do not even want to think about the tons of crap that will flood Steemit if we score 100,000 users :-/
True, but you aren't able to just sign up and cash out. They have created a great way to prevent extreme price fluctuations. Scalability will be important as not everyone has the ability to read and upvote content. Being followed by a group that enjoys your content will be important, but a way to discover new users and keep smaller fish from becoming discouraged, because if a large amount of people stop enjoying the platform, steem will be worthless. I'm ok with having invested no fiat dollars and having the opportunity to take some out. I don't know what twitter was like at first (It's pretty crappy now IMO) but they did scale it with ads. I'm constantly thinking of ways to improve it and thought https://steemit.com/steemit/@bendjmiller222/proposal-to-bring-non-intrusive-optional-ads-to-steemit might be a viable option. I know it's decentralized, but if you post content that consistantly receives a large percentage of downvotes, I think your power should be limited. Also new users should probably not have unlimited posting available. For certain levels yes, because those people want to only create good content, but new users should have a limit of three or four posts until they reach a certain level. Less total posts, but greater quality should be a win win for everyone. I understand there are flaws that need addressing, but just because we aren't dolphins or whales doesn't mean we can't come up with ideas that others may see and love. I'm willing to try and if I make money doing that's cool, but not the most important thing to me.