Steem's value will only increase when things are proportional. If you have bots doing all the valuable upvoting the ecosystem will be drained which is one reason why your votes are worth what you say they are worth. Steemit doesn't care about long-term growth. If they did, they would find a solution so new users didn't abandon after posting 1-2 times. Sites need to be sticky for new users. I wrote a hack script to see what's going on and I concluded the obvious. The imbalance of power (minnow to whale) creates low-quality content from those with power. Whales do not create anything of value. They abuse, extract, and funnel steem to put what they perceive as value into their pockets. If you don't have significant steam power you have absolutely no power so all the power is held by steem collecting voting bots and whales like @jerrybanfield who will sell minnows a post-vote in exchange 1 Steem. Shit, if someone wants to send me 1 Steem I will take the time to at least read your post and maybe vote and comment if I can add value to your post.
No steem related ICO is going to do jack shit. Why? Because this platform wouldn't do jack shit without bots. The folks at steemit know this. In some ways, this platform functions like a pyramid scheme but it's not as blatant. Furthermore, SMT's will also fail, because, again, the bots are the only thing keeping this place alive. You need to focus on new users to build anything worthwhile. Without new users, you have nothing but a bunch of money-grubbing content creators who can post complete shit and still hit the trending page. This platform has NO algorithm because the team is not capable. Writing a voting algorithm is some basic shit. But this site is not about creating and voting on good content. It's about extracting money. I would love to see Steemit close all rewards for 3 days and see how many daily active users, postings and comments the site gets. This is beta, you should experiment to learn.
Steemit calls this Beta. But beta means to iterate and change things early and often. I haven't seen much change, especially to the obvious things. I get it, they want to be the pipes, but if the pipes are corroded with slime you won't get very far when installing something new like SMT. The team has clearly lost focus. You can only do one thing really well. If you want to do many without applying what you have learned you will fail.
Want to read why the market is down? here is the real reason.
RE: MY VOTE IS WORTH 7 CENTS! | dreamvlog #39 [DTubeDaily]