I want to see a shift and change in the culture of Steem. I want people to see they don't need to buy votes, and how doing so destroys proof of brain.

Amen to that.

Great to hear your passion and enthusiasm as always.

Also, great to hear your ethos about making the platform as fun and rewarding for everyone as possible. It's the way forward and I've been saying for nearly a year that it's the only way to bring back many who've left, and build a better steem for those still to join us.

I know I've been critical in the past, and that criticism has always come from a place of wanting to see steem succeed. I've also commented somewhere - can't remember where - about the risk of nullifying steems reward mechanism with SMT communities. I'm not even sure where I land on that anymore. I can see that even if that becomes the case, steem token will still have demand (leasing SP and RC's for community and business interests who want to leverage SMT tokens/communities) but I don't want to see it go the way of no proof of brain on steem.

I can kind of see a future where the people creating content (that earns high rewards) on steem become less, and the new onboarded masses gain most of their rewards from the SMT token that's attached to the community they produce content on. But as you point out - and lukestokes made the comparison with Eos - without people/stake active on steem (voting witnesses as well as making content) who keeps steem's governance structure functioning?

It's for that reason, and others, I'm definitely of the mind that we need to keep pushing steem as a place where people can create, curate and have some fun interacting with people all over the world, and be rewarded for that. This is the dream! This basic functionality of steem is the apple hanging from the tree. It is the USP... whatever you wanna call it. It's the thing that is nowhere on internet 2.0... a truly unique system that the vast majority of the world don't even know exists.

Lol, the steem dream I need to write a post about 😉

If we forked the voting out of steem in an attempt to boost some other functionality and let all the reward mechanism go to SMT communities, it would be like spending three years hand carving and polishing a gem, then throwing it in the trash because there are one or two flaws.

Anyway, I'm down with #newsteem now. I've had my head turned around by what has happened with getting rid of crap on trending and the massive reduction of bidbot use. And even more impressed with some bidbots turning to manual curation to help support content creators while earning from curation rewards for their delegators. It's a brave New world 🙂

P.s. I love your analogy about the tree and the branches