"All social media platforms undertake this ability. The only difference is that Steem enables folks to receive emuneration from this directly. Most platforms centralize that money instead."

Okay, I think you meant remuneration, and if so, that comes from us. They've got the worthless token, and we give the token a market value by buying into it. However, what we bought into does not have crowd wisdom, as shown in the blue paper, and is on par with gambling, as shown in the white paper. The average person is sold via word of mouth and doesn't realize it's on par with gambling until they get here and lose often enough to come to the realization. The main steem condenser is advertising now, and that's not getting kicked back to the users. The money goes to the STINC corporation, just as the other platforms do.

P.S. remunerate: means "to pay an equivalent for."
For most people, that is not what is happening here.

"Because, by the mechanism I have exhaustively explained, this reduces the value of the stake they HODL. That you still ask this question despite my exhaustive explanations, that you, as I have repeatedly noted, have simply not addressed, reveals that you do not understand what I have explained. Either you ignore what I say, are not competent to grasp it, or deliberately affect to pretend to.

It is therefore unlikely, after repeated attempts to provide that necessary understanding to you have been unsuccessful, continuing to do so will succeed. You have not successfully answered, or rebutted, or refuted my points in any way. You just either refuse to discuss them, or cannot."

I thought I understood you in the last reply, I thought, that maybe you were under the misunderstanding that votes cause inflation. You said something which suggested to me that it might be your understanding. However, I guess you said it is not. It doesn't change the fact that even stakeholders are sometimes quality content creators too. If they highly reward content creators for quality posts, they ought to be able to do the same on their posts when they create quality content. Right now, for this post, if I had half a million steem, I'd give it a 100% upvote. I'd do it because I value my work, I'd do it because I know it's quality. If seeing a high-quality post get rewarded by a large stakeholder turns you off to the platform, or somehow diminishes steem's value, then I truly do not know what makes you tick or how you come to that conclusion.

"No. You could not express this principle without it meaning what it does. I did not 'invert' what you said. It is simply what you mean to say that is false and insulting. I am not insulted, because it is false. I mention it because it's one example of how your thinking is muddled by basing your statements on falsehoods. A thing is true, or it is not. If it is not, then all subsequent statements based on that false premise are false, too. This statement is not the cause of your assumptions being false, but is based on factual misunderstandings that underlie both it, and all other understanding. Enabling you to grasp that it is false enables you to change your mind and become right. Were you interested in being right, you would take advantage of that opportunity to do so.

What did you do with that opportunity?

You simply reaffirmed your faulty understanding by rephrasing it, rather than correcting it. The words you use are but expressions of your understanding and beliefs, and merely changing the words you use to express false beliefs and mistaken understanding does not create factual basis for your statements.

What I have become completely certain of in this conversation is that you have determined upon a belief and are prepared to maintain it despite any facts that may prove it false. This is a common human trait. Study has revealed that people that deliberately deny facts to maintain their social membership are rewarded by a shot of dopamine when they do.

This is your brain on drugs."

Let us compare side by side, what I said, and how you interpreted it.

What I said: "Self-voting is not "evil" I've seen self-voters who create high-quality content. If they have any sense of self-esteem and pride in their content then they will vote themselves."

How you interpreted my statement: "You said the only people that don't self vote have no self esteem or confidence their content had value. I said that's bullshit, and it is, because I don't self vote and I know my content is valuable."

I did not say what you said I did. In my statement, the highlighted words are the people who I was talking about. As you've stated, you are not a self-voter, so how could this possibly apply to you? This leads me to conclude that you either inverted or twisted what I said, and then personalized it. I was kind enough to say that maybe I could have said it differently to avoid confusion. And apparently, you think that was a weakness, or that I am back peddling, I assure you I am not. Just compare what I said to what you said I said, and if you are honest with yourself, you'll probably come to the same conclusion.

"Yes, and inflation is a minor one. However, you used inflation as a shield against discussion of the highly potent reason I have discussed, and this is disingenuous, appearing to be a deliberate ploy to divert the discussion away from points you want to ignore.

Such ploys do not increase understanding and development of reasonable policy, and this is why they are useful to people that intend to support their position, right or wrong."

I thought I was onto something. I thought I finally discovered why you were against self-voting, but you know what, I think I remember now. Your reasoning was stripped from the white paper, almost verbatim. It was the analogy about selling the machinery of the business. Yeah, that was it. However, what that fails to take into account is that many company owners, also work for the company. So, forgoing themselves their paycheck for the work they did, isn't necessarily an altruistic thing to do. It could be considered just plain ole stupid, especially if the business owner has a family to feed at home.

"Given that the greatest value of Steem lies in it's ability to enable people to self govern, rather than financially profit, I don't agree. It may pump and dump, but that is not it's most powerful attribute. When all the profiteers are gone, folks intent on voluntarist interactions will be able to use it to govern themselves by discussing and financially effecting policy.

In the meantime, it is relatively censorship resistant, which makes it far preferable to most other media for me."

Think about it for a moment. If BTC pumps and old whales get out; The fact that they could sell to get out means that someone will be buying. The buyers will lose their ass when BTC dumps, and this means that many of them will manipulate the system in clever ways to try to accumulate as much steem as humanly possible. This, so when it pumps again, they can either get out even or with a profit. The problem will not go anywhere; You’ll just have new actors until the market reveals that the reputation of the system has destroyed itself.

"I'm not even sure how you can state this with a straight face. User retention YOY has been shown to be somewhere around ~5%. That means that 95% of the crabs leave. That's how bad Steem is being implemented. That's the impact of profiteering. It destroys the endeavor it sucks the value out of.

That is why I proposed a mechanism that would remove the financial incentive to extract rewards that should be being invested in content creators. Until such a mechanism is successfully deployed, Steem will continue to perform at this level, because it is designed to facilitate profiteering, and that is utterly contrary to capital gains. Capital gains is what builds endeavors into successful enterprises. Profiteering can only destroy them.

Here we are."

I think the largest contributor to the impact of retention was the deflation of the BTC bubble, and if you want to take that one step further, that is probably what led to what you consider profiteering. However, you can't necessarily paint someone as a profiteer without knowing how much steem they bought and at what price or if they've broken even or not.