You hit the nail on the head man. I've been here for only about a month or so and honestly I see more glaring flaws than good developments. I've said this elsewhere many times, Steemit needs TWO big things in order to stay alive, even in the face of developed competition like Reddit and Facebook and countless other forums on the internet:
A good reason for people to want to be on the platform itself, to engage with it as a user
A good reason for people to want to buy Steem
They are connected, because clearly what Steemit has on Reddit is that the karma translates to actual money paid out. But if no one buys the money, then you are effectively not getting paid. And right now, no offense but playing games with the bandwidth of the platform really doesn't cut it as the sole reason to buy Steem. If all there is to do with this currency is to power it up and delegate around and make money upvoting or selling your vote and so forth, then it will dry up as soon as that becomes unprofitable. This is not a problem that is unique to Steemit, that is a problem all cryptocurrencies share and frankly Steemit is actually one step ahead in that regard because it actually has a function, as opposed to that of most cryptos which is exactly jack shit.
But just look at upvote calculator right now: you need 70 steem power for your vote to be worth 1 cent, and even then people get paid out half a cent in sbd and like 0.1 cent or something in SP. Aside from the fact that that even is below the threshold where you will get paid, or someone else gets paid when you upvote them, it means that someone needs to fork out about 70 x 3 to 5 dollars however much steem costs at the moment, let's say 2 USD. So 140 USD for your vote to count a cent. When you can right now go to Reddit and have the same experience and never pay anything, ever. Like for real, there HAS to be something on the platform that you can use Steem on, because people won't keep on just buying the currency. The current downtrend may well be the start of the end in that regard. If there is no market volume anymore, if there is no one on Poloniex or Bittrex or whatever forking out bitcoin for Steem you my friend who "earns" a hundred bucks on every post are boned.
I mean can you see average joe wanting to get on social media and get greeted with a white paper and convoluted modeling and technicals about what Steem and Steem Power and SBD are, AND also have to buy some of that on some crypto exchange? It sounds ludicrous really. And on the flipside the visibility is SO bad on this platform that you really need to actively filter by tags to get away from the endless crytpo circlejerk and even then you're more than likely still awash in a sea of shit posts. So even if you are somewhat popular, you need 500 new accounts to vote on a post so that you can make one dollar. That is absolutely abysmal, and it will not happen. The only way you can hope to get any traction is to play the upvote bot game, which adds to the pressure to buy steem and keeps the economy going, yes, but in of itself doesn't offer another reason to buy the currency other than platform internal stuff that you may or may not care about.
Plus there's no moderation and any whale can appoint themselves as a resident party pooper and flag your posts and there's nothing you can do about it. Think about it, when and if the platform gets any kind of traction, Facebook can set up a dark fund where they dedicate like a million bucks to stopping this platform. All they need to do is buy a bunch of steem and make a few SP heavy accounts, and then go on a spree flagging everything on the site. With 20-100 accounts like that and a bot network they can stop this site from working, as everything is being downvoted into oblivion. No one gets paid, people get the shits with the platform.
Like for real, being on this platform to me now is like an exercise in sadomasochism. Every other day something else happens that turns my stomach here.
RE: Steemit isn't gunna last long at this rate...