I agree someone has to pay. Who do you think pays for google's servers? The advertisers that run on their platform. These advertisers pay a lot because they have a lot of users. Do you think steemit's witnesses could run google's servers with the income that they make?
Increasing the amount of users is critical to keeping steem as a cryptocurrency afloat for many years to come. So far it's mostly survived off of speculators, but the speculators, are getting smarter and the days of people throwing crypto money at anything with a blockchain developer are over imo.
I see two main options for bringing money in. 1) bring in more users, then you have more traffic, which means more advertising moeny. 2) bring in more users to dapp games, these people pay for in app game coins or other things that brings in money. Dapps are always a risk because as we've seen with dlive, they can jump ship to another chain overnight.
In either case users are important, and they need to be increasing. The alexa ranking of steemit.com is steadily declining. Do you think speculators are going to buy in if the user base is shrinking?
Unfortunately, building UI's with aesthetic design and user friendliness are not steemit inc's strong suit. These detract from users wanting to join and stay. Along with other things like opinion flagging and excessive use of bidbots rather rewarding content with POB.
My main point is that until these fundamental issues are addressed, the userbase and revenue will potentially decline, putting the steem blockchain at risk of fading away, or at a minimum, just existing with only a few diehard fanboys. Not a lot of revenue will come in if the traffic keeps going down. The speculators and investors will be looking at growth, as they should with any social network as a way to judge it's value.
Who is going to pay the witnesses and blockchain developers when the investors and speculators leave due to declining users?
RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?