RE: First Steem Post, Intro, Questions to community, Ranting and cryptocats
Welcome to Steemit, and best of luck on the platform. I'll try to answer a couple of your questions. 1. It seems like most people favor this as a content generation platform, since we're trying to reward content. Mainly just because sharing content is typically so easy, that those types of posts don't typically see very high rewards, unless there is some value added. For example, some users just make a post as a single youtube video as there entire steemit post, and it's unclear if they're the actual author of the video, or just reposting. There are also potential copyright issues at play, since you would effectively be monetizing someone else's content. 2. One thing that I believe is in the works is integration with a decentralized video platform, not sure on the progress of that. An issue is that after 7 days, content cannot receive additional payouts (as far as I know), so it is still questionable whether the platform really makes sense for people trying to monetize content long term, since there is currently not a mechanism for receiving royalties, etc... 3. The 'revenue' that is distributed to the posts comes from Steem tokens which are minted and distributed by the rewards algorithm. The Steem tokens basically has value for the same reason anything has value, they're socially perceived as value. Actually Steem has many advantages that make it vastly superior to BTC: nearly instant, highly reliable transaction times (~1.5 second confirmation times), and truly zero transaction fees.
I'm probably not the best person to answer about this. I believe that the 7 day limit is imposed because of technological reasons, i.e. if ALL existing posts are included in every payout calculation, the computational cost of the calculation essentially grows without bound. I believe other solutions are in the works, and changes to the payout structure are always being considered (there is a big change coming on Tuesday which has been slightly contentious, although the witnesses pretty much unanimously support it). The platform is still 'beta' apparently, although I have no idea how long that is going to last. In terms of the business model, I guess Steem does have a market cap of $500 million, so I don't know if I would call it a weak business model. Consider the examples of Facebook, twitter, reddit, etc... Personally I would rather have the opportunity to receive a single payout for my content than no opportunity. Also, it's important to recognize that the Steem network has much greater applications than simply the Steemit website. The Steem network is a blockchain with zero transaction fees and nearly instant confirmations. If you wanted to build a traditional platform like Twitter on top of Steem that allowed monetization and included opportunities for traditional ad revenue it is possible, although you would probably be better off waiting for EOS for that.
Microtransactions is definitely a winners game for steem in blockchain arena.
What I mean by saying 'weak business model' is that it doesn't appear sustainable at the moment, as it purely dependent on investors.
Twitter has monetisation issues on its own, only generating revenues from ads and promotions only, which is not good enough in my opinion.
EOS not launched yet, so quite a long way to go for it. Proposition is promising, as well as the foundation in steem and bitshares. I'm happy with steem chain for now, I just have a feeling that it has certain content issues, which I'm trying to figure out.