I'm grateful to the steemit community for a lot of things and I do my best to provide quality content and uphold the image that I think many of us want for this community. That being said, I want to offer some constructive advice to other "heavy users" of the platform. I say users and not investors for a reason and I'll get to that later, but please keep an open mind when reading this post and these suggestions. I can't tell you right from wrong, it's something you have to figure out for yourselves, but I'll explain my position on some things and why I run my account the way I do. Feel free to offer your perspective, but please have the courtesy to not tell me that mine is wrong.
Stop Gaming the System
I made a post about this topic back during the flag wars when times were bad, and here we are in arguably much more favorable waters and I feel it needs to be brought up again. First and foremost, you are ruining the image of the platform by being greedy and in turn taking the "maximize quick cash and run" strategy of many failed crypto currencies. It's ignorant to try to maximize your profit by ruining the image of the crypto currency. It's a fact that many new users that leave and people that refuse to even use the site believe that it's a whale run monopoly and that the game is rigged. Well like anything that brings money into the picture, greed quickly follows, but the difference is that steemit still has a core community of users that stick together and support each other even though many whales are intentionally gaming the system and ruining the value.
I already said I'm not calling out names in this post, but I can assure you from plenty of first hand experience and run-ins throughout my time on steemit that it is absolutely true. People are gaming the system and cashing out a large chunk of the reward pool and it's ruining payouts for new users. Overlooking how short-sighted and destructive this is, let's talk about why it's essentially throwing away a real opportunity to build something better and more valuable. Users are necessary to make any economy work because they are the people that hold value in said economy. When you run off new users, you are lowering the value of your own investment. Gaming the system and hoarding the rewards onto accounts adding no value to the platform is not only showing people that it's rigged, but you are also stopping new content creators from adopting the platform.
Mass Adoption
The only way to ever get steemit into a viable position to replace the already corrupt social media platforms is to stop running it like one. When you have the same accounts self promoting and robbing the reward pool you are preventing adoption. Users are in and of themselves a currency. The more users you have, the more in demand steem power will be. The witnesses have already switched payouts to production of SBD instead of steem on 50/50 posts a long time ago. If you don't get it, they are rewarding you in the disposable currency to make steem more scarce. This is adding to the dollar value of steem, but it's stopping new users from having incentive to 100% power up posts or buy into steem. I believe this is intentional to keep power players in play and slow the rate at which others can "take their power." Again this relates to greed which doesn't really work in a "gift economy." (I'm going to credit that term to @stellabelle because that's where I first heard the term used, if I'm wrong please correct me.)
A Different Approach
I have a suggestion to fix issues and add value to your investments at the same time. I'm sure any high value whales and investors in the platform are smart enough to understand that increase in price versus increase in quantity of lower priced tokens is either an outright better solution or at least as beneficial. Let's discuss how to make that happen: I suggest instead of selling your voting power or circle jerking each other to milk whatever profit out of steem you can, that you start in turn using that power to promote new users or flag accounts that are actively stealing and plagiarizing content. I'm actually suggesting using flags for what they are intended to do, mind blowing concept I know, but consider it. We could clean up the platform while giving new users something to be happy about and tell others who can in turn adopt steemit. Sure you may not get to milk liquid rewards every 7 days, but long term the value is going to increase astronomically. If you want to ever see $10 steem tokens or higher, the gaming of the reward pool has to stop.
I personally have made many new friends on this platform and I know it may not be the most popular decision among all of them, but I rarely give 100% up votes. I'll tell you why that is if you are unaware, I try my best to find new users or users I've never interacted with and upvote quality content. Sure I could hoard my steem power and make an extra couple of bucks for myself per post, but I can see the bigger picture. The more quality content on the platform, the more users we attract, the higher the price goes, and in the end we all win. I know people that are gaming the system will not like this post as I'm confirming that it is actually a reality, but personally I don't give a fuck. I'm not motivated by greed and I never have been. If you want to burn it down for a few quick bucks and selling your vests to people that don't know better, go ahead, but I think I've laid out solid reasons why you shouldn't. Namaste.