In the past, I complained about what seemed like general apathy towards the Steemit.com front-end on the part of STINC. Truth is, it often seemed as if Steemit was an afterthought which had been in "beta" for many months before, and since, I arrived. New features are rare and existing features are sparse. Much digital ink has been spilled over the lack of even a basic resteem filter.
Even STINC itself regularly refers to a vision of "tokenizing the web." You'll note there is no mention of blogging, paying content creators, or cultivating an online community. It's pretty explicit - it's all about the "tokens", which in this case, refers to the forthcoming Smart Media Token functionality being added to the Steem blockchain. In fact, I've even seen Ned state that blogging/Steemit is not their focus, though I don't feel like searching the comment up.
This used to irk me, as I was a "blogger." The thing is, I didn't intend to be. I was simply a crypto investor before I found Steem - at first, the blogging just seemed like something extra I could do with a coin I had a small investment in. Before I knew it, I found myself buying a lot more Steem and powering it up.
However, lately I've decided to take a "wait and see" approach. The more I use other cryptocurrencies, the more I am annoyed with the fees and transaction times. Even Ethereum has been slowish lately. Steem kills most other cryptocurrencies on both transaction times and zero fees - a fact I am reminded of far too regularly.
Is the best use of Steem really a blogging platform? Perhaps not. Perhaps this has all been a large dress rehearsal for bootstrapping a young cryptocurrency, while giving decisive proof-of-concept that it can handle huge transaction load without fees. On top of that, Steemit comes with the advantage of distributing some of the currency to early supporters based not only on financial investment (although this is an option,) but also to some extent on merit. This would hopefully eliminate the Steem-concentration problem we currently have, with some 90+% of the Steem held by the top 1% of users.
Most of us look at Steem as Steemit rewards, but that is only one use. Some other users, particularly certain large and notorious whales, simply look at Steem like any other DPOS coin - they vote themselves most of their own stake each day, albeit usually with some attempt to either cloak or make it "culturally" acceptable.
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