I've had growing concerns over the actions of the CEO of Steemit Inc. for a while now, but at the point that personal drama is now being aired out publicly on the blockchain, I feel that it's time to express my concerns publicly and hopefully inspire some self reflection and change to some issues that I feel are fundamentally devaluing the platform. While I am perfectly aware that I have no authority over what you do with your own personal stake, I am hoping that you will consider the points I am about to make carefully and why I am bringing them up. Hopefully you will take the criticism in a constructive manner and realize that I am one of the people that have been working for over a year now to help grow this platform and that there is clearly some disconnect with your vision or actions and the actual users of the platform.
My first issue is obviously the screenshot above. Users drive value to a currency just as much as investors and while both are necessary, you know as well as we do that the value of STEEM increases with more users. If you really feel like your words are worth almost $2000 USD each (after the community has flagged it down considerably) then I think you are drastically out of touch with the average users and content creators on this platform. If this was a more simple blockchain that was solely based on proof-of-stake or proof-of-work, perhaps I would feel differently, but considering we have actual content creators on the platform earning pennies it draws a stark comparison and really hurts our image to see the CEO do this.
My second issue is that your delegations seem to be focused more on ways to grow your personal token holdings instead of actually retaining users to increase the value of the platform. While I do agree that there is some value to the apps you have delegated to or some of the people you've delegated to in hopes of growing the user base in other countries, there are many small communities and even large ones that actually work tirelessly without taking profits for themselves to grow and retain the user base that could much more efficiently put half a million SP of stake weight to use than delegating out to a single person. I come from a business background and I understand the need to make money on our investments, but the CEO of the company should be equally focused on growing value of the actual platform instead of personal wealth in my humble opinion.
I fully admit that I do not know you personally and I cannot claim to know your intentions, but perception of the people that are using your platform does matter. I would encourage you to be more transparent about development of the platform and to actually take community suggestions and requests into consideration. Drawing comparison to GOLOS, we can see features that have been being requested for over a year now already implemented and working that we can't even get a response on. I'm sure there are dynamics to steering a growing company of this size that complicate your interactions or create potential conflicts of interests, but transparency and integrity are things that I feel most of the community value greatly. Hopefully you take my concerns into consideration and we continue to grow and thrive as a team that is much larger than the company itself for all of the users that consider steemit to have the potential to change the world and revolutionize content creation and social media.
@ned