A full 10 upvotes probably has an ROI of 30%. That's not outrageous. When I as an investor saw this, I didn't invest in steem. I invested in the stock market and made over 300% in weed stocks.

What if the maindriver for investors for ROI should be from the raising value of the stake itself, like with regular stocks that you mention. Rewardpool is meant to incentivize good content creation. The main goal should be to increase the value of Steem itself. How do we do that? Well, consider this: When there is a Trending page that has quality content, it draws eyes, a place with a lot of attention means there's a lot of value. So, let's say someone wants to promote a project of some sort, the ideal solution is to decline payouts. Why? Because then there's a smaller chance to receive downvotes, because it isn't abusive behavior and the promoter needs to pay for it instead of getting positive ROI.

Now, wouldn't you say that a healthy Trending brings more users here than shitty Trending? More users means that there will be scarcity for Steem, because it is needed to do transactions on the blockchain. Scarcity for Steem means that the price will go up. This will also be aided in the coming Hard Fork when (hopefully) Smart Media Tokens will arrive with lite accounts.

These people behind the steem blacklist have destroyed steem they do exactly what Haejin does but with vote bots. They seem to think there's a difference between selling your votes or just upvoting yourself. These voting bot people are all witnesses now. The End!

You seem like you haven't been paying attention. Bid bots can not continue their business model the same, because the threat of downvotes that are now on a separate pool from upvotes. They are now forced to raise their quality standards, because the community won't allow the ability to promote shit content with positive ROI anymore. Many promotional services have actually turned into curation to provide that ROI to their delegators. Talking of which, if you're too lazy to curate, you can always delegate your power to ethical projects like @ocdb or @curangel – the latter of which does the curation for you.

The good content creators have already left anyways because this payment method has failed.

I see a great amount of good content creators here, but we may have a different taste then.

The best blockcain in the world based on its utility is overlooked from the international crypto community because the arguing of the reward pool is all they see. Stop the bullshit create a 100% upvote button for investors who don't care about curating but realize the huge potential this blockchain has as a utility.

Steem is very overlooked yes, but the "arguing over reward pool" is not what the public knows, the public perception is that Steemit = Steem and that the whole thing is a dead project because Steemit layed off 70% of their staff. This is what the so called "crypto experts" know, which is very far from the truth.

It's true that Steem doesn't have to be a payment system, but when there's a reward pool that is shared for authors, it improves the distribution of stake. And distribution is very important in a decentralized system, which – despite happening slowly – is improving continuously via the distributed STEEM from reward pool.

Every Steem Power holder is also an investor. If investors should get 100%, then there might as well not be any reward pool at all. This would completely destroy the idea of a social blockchain. No need to create good content when there's no reward from which to get anything anymore. You say adds solve the problem. Maybe, but without reward pool, the distribution would be shit which is counterproductive in order to create a robust decentralized system.

Steem is like highspeed internet and etherium is like dial up!!!

Now that I completely agree with! Some Ethereum based game even jumped to Steem, because it's impossible to operate large amounts of micro transactions on Ethereum.