RE: Our Plan for Onboarding the Masses

Your plan to onboard the masses is ignoring a few crucial factors.

There is so much that needs to happen beyond what this post expresses. It's a good bit of PR writing though 👍

Here's what I'd do if I had steem's stake:

• You can offer new users the chance to not join and become disappointed within a month of joining that quality of content isn't any indication of how they will be rewarded. Believe me, the only reason why any quality content creators I've seen on steem don't leave within the first three months was because of @curie, I worked for curie for a while and I'm sure of this as fact!

How can this be achieved?

• You can stop ignoring the massive abuse of power that early adopters continue to take for granted. Use your stake to downvote the obvious massive reward pool rapists and mega trolls that make this platform a shity thing to look at, and for some, be involved with. Censorship by consensus only works with a group of reasonable, intelligent people with power to find consensus. Not by a massive minority of ego maniacs with a kim jong il complex, this isn't north Korea... I hope! These peopke provide one simple message to anyone looking at steem and considering joining; that it is just a 'who stakes the most' wins platform. The overwhelming discrepancy in stake (the wealth gap) on steem negates any reasonable consensus of censorship, as the massively stake wealthy have far too much power to manipulate through either fear or incentive.
• You can leverage your ninja mined stake (steemit.inc) to make sure that vote sellers are not endorsed as legitimate members of the community. It's time to shit or get off the pot steemit.inc. Do you care about the success of steem as it was originally envisioned? Vote bidbot owners out of consensus witness positions with stinc's stake, while providing some incentive to other large stake holders to support the position of continued downvote control on bidbot owners, and users, which would curb the influence of such detrimental mechanisms and help realise steem's original value proposition.
• You can stop trying to fool the community by joining in with the smoke and mirror politics that the value steem has been bled by content creators only. The top 10% (sp wealthy) are some of the worst leechers of value, particularly bidbot owners, hold them to account; you have the stake to do it. The depreciation of steem's value is not all down to comment spammers and plagiarism scammers with small accounts. That is a political narrative that had been perpetuated by some of the wealthiest (stakeholders) on steem. An equal (or larger) amount of price depreciation has come from the highest SP holders and vote sellers taking value out of the system by promoting content that provides no value for anyone, but profits them. If I had more SQL knowledge I might be able to query the blockchain for stats on this, but one thing I'm certain of is that at least 6-7 of the top 20 witnesses run vote selling services according to my research. Apparently HF21 and the EIP is meant to mitigate against vote selling and encourage manual curation? I'm going to say outright that a group of consensus witnesses with even one bidbot owner in the group isn't impartial. Witnesses have private telegram groups.
• You can stop pandering to witnesses. Realise that this platform as a glorified excuse for various business interests to incentivise advertising holds less than a fraction of the value proposition of people being rewarded for quality content based on talent, interest and creativity. The masses will on-board with the chance at realising a dream of rewards for expressing their passions a million times quicker than they do with the offer of 'the same, old same old' product hunt, or write for my agenda incentives. It baffles me how anyone can't see that we had the winning formula. If someone/s with stake had the guts to step up and regulate those who want exploit this USP then even the selfish people who want to only take, might see their investment appreciate through the coin price above and beyond how much they can leech out over 2-3 years.
• You can continue to market steem as the real paradigme shifting and unique idea it started off as; a content creation platform, while ensuring that it remains so. This can be achieved, not by giving the power of your stake into a centralised authority (the committee of three people you recently announced do not represent a community of 10000 people, they represent the business interests of 3 people), but by using your stake to negate the massive reward pool rape perpetuated by whales who hypocritically state people should live up to values they never stick to themselves. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence who joins the steem blockchain can see that it's one rule for the proles on steem, and another for the whales, vote selling barons and witnesses. Apparently, we're all in it together... I know many people on steem who've never powered down (including myself)... but they're not making tens of thousands of dollars/year by making this platform look like a lie and a Ponzi scheme to anyone who joins up.

Finally, you use 'the root problem' as one of your titles. I read thorough the whole post, and I agree that communities and SMT's may allow the onboarding of large community groups with varied interests (especially as it will be decentralised at the blockchain level). But if we've learnt one thing from Scot and tribes, it's that creating a community and a token does not equal value. A community's value is only as strong as the people 'hodling' the token, and the leaders moderating the content. Steem needs a strong foundation value on the token, we have a strong community, but without fixing the 'root problems' I've stated above steem as a blockchain is just going to perpetuate the same corruption and avarice across a thousand SMT communities. That's the nature of the beast, and human behaviour. The root problem that you've brushed over is that the corruption at the core of the governance of steem needs to be addressed, or steem will founder and die.

I really don't want to see that happen. Cheers.