My Vision for Steem

This is my response to Hive account@llfarm's post What Is YOUR Vision For Steem?

My vision for Steem is for it to be(come) a platform, which:

1.) incentivizes people to buy STEEM & hold it as Steempower.
2.) incentivizes developers to build their apps with STEEM OR to integrate STEEM.
3.) attracts millions of users via a low entry barrier.
4.) distributes its inflation primarily to users who are bringing value to it & who are developing/enhancing it.

How do we achieve this?

Let me start with the perspective of an investor.

Currently, STEEM is sadly not an obvious choice for investors due to its somewhat-high inflationary model (which is not directly given out to the stakeholders) and the non-straightforward way for stakeholders to earn with their stake. (investing in bid-bots is "baaaad")

Besides that, the image of Steem is also not as good as it should be. While we do have talented developers in the ecosystem, building projects that are enhancing the value of Steem, the core image of Steem is quite poor. Many people see it as the predecessor of EOS and judge it by missed deadlines (e.g. SMTs), cover-headlines (Steemit Inc. 70% layoff) and it's not-updated flagship - Steemit.com.

The confusing situation around "who is responsible for Steem" isn't helping either. From an outside perspective, dan & ned created Steem (in addition with Steemit.com). While dan has obviously moved on, ned seemingly also transitioned away by resigning as CEO and tacking on the chairman of the board. I'm not sure what exactly this new job includes, but his account, previously holding millions of Steem, is pretty much empty. His activity on Steem? Non-existent. (Imagine jack, the founder of Twitter, wouldn't use his own platform to communicate. Or Jeff Bezos wouldn't hold any Amazon stock. Would be pretty weird, right?)

While Steemit Inc's. new MD/CEO, Eli Powell, is doing a great job, it sadly doesn't change the fact that from the outside it looks like the two founders of Steem, have moved on. And there is only so much Eli is able to do, to keep the ship above waters.

Before you get the idea that I'm pessimistic about Steem's future, let me stop you right there. I'm not - I still believe in Steem. I'm simply radical honest. And we need this radical truth in order to make sure that Steem becomes the platform we want it to become. We don't need more BS; we need changes.

So, what do I have in mind?

Running the proposal system, developed by Hive account@blocktrades, as fast as possible, which is needed to fund changes that we need on Steem. Which could include:

• Increasing curation rewards to 50%
• Developing a system that splits stakeholder rewards & rewards for participating on voting/downvoting, which then hopefully cleans up the trending page.

Changes like the ones above will obviously require some stake-weighted voting and fruitful discussions, but we can't just let things run as they are now. Some of those decisions might not be perfect, but with iteration, we'll get there; and most of that is better than the status quo of Steem literary falling in value steadily.

Honestly, the fact alone that Hive account@blocktrades developed the proposal system as fast as they did, should show all of us, that we are able to change Steem, we just need to talk less, make some tough decisions and do more.