I've already been doing that technically, but I am just letting those who follow me know, so they can unfollow if they want to clean out follows. And if they want to know my reasoning.
This platform definitely needs a lot of work, I'm rarely interested in the top rated content and read more stuff via reddit. Steemit as it is, is not a competitor to reddit (maybe it's not supposed to be), it doesn't organize content as well, it doesn't promote creation of high quality content, the markdown language is limiting (tables allow you to make up for some of it!).
| That said, steemit seems like a good place for people to create blogs on the off chance that you get noticed by senpai whale and end up on their follow list. As a blogging platform seems great, and you can share blogs on other social network platform (as opposed to steemit being a decentralized replacement for them). |  |
I just don't understand why whales would hang out here except that they are trapped in their investment and feel that it is a waste to not upvote content, to control rewards and promote content they like.
The high quality useful content I see here doesn't always get noticed by whales, and a lot of weak content filled with strawman arguments and fallacies seems to dominate the attention of whales, not to mention some degree of bias towards steemit optimism. Sorry I can't be more specific than that but it's not worth my time to go through everything I've read and criticize it all.
It's been said that steemit is an economic system, not really a social network. Okay, if it is, lets distill its' economics.
Steemit will always be powered over 90%. These are three things to consider:
- The obvious one is that the 10% rewards are mostly in SP.
- The not so obvious one is that SP has value that people are willing to pay for. With SP you can control rewards and you can promote propaganda. The more valuable this is, the more willing people will be to hold SP above 90%. The payment for having power will be in it's dilution (being above 90%), requiring you to acquire more steem to keep your power up.
- Finally, who wants to hold steem? If "money is taken from those who speculate on the steem currency" why would anyone want to hold steem in an exchange?
Unpowered steem is not so bad so long as steem is overpowered, since that means SP holders are also paying for the rewards by dilution of their power.
The only way that steem goes up in value is that SP keeps moving towards 100%. That is that newly created steem does not result in an increase in the exchange supply or at least less is exposed than increases in demand. That does mean your power will be reduced, and get closer to being diluted by 10% annually unless you acquire more to offset it.
The real question is, is SPs utility value worth losing 10% to dilution? It's kind of a trick question because 10% could be worth $1 but it could also be worth $1000, depending on the exchange rate. But if it is worth it, then it can keep moving closer to 100%, if the market values it closer to 4%, people will power down when it goes over that. But as the exchange rate value goes down, as more steem is exposed to exchanges from power downs, that tolerated percentage will go up. In that way it is self balancing as it tries to find what the market value is for SP.
But still, is SPs utility value worth it today? The challenge of steemit is to make SP worth holding and acquiring by what you can do with it, it's intrinsic value (currently in curating/upvoting/promoting). And the answer for me at least, is that it is not worth it so long as there are whales, that is they have a lot more power and influence and it isn't diluted enough. It's too expensive! That means the price is still too high and will need to come down more. I hate to say that, since that basically means I overpaid for my SP, but that means down the road I'll be able to buy more at a more reasonable price.
The other way of making SP more valuable is to be able to do more with it, or give reasons to divide power. Like having subreddits (substeemits?), and whales can park amounts of SP in different subs that when they upvote content they have less influence. This gives minnows a fighting chance since they can focus their power on a single sub they care about, while whales will be able to spread their influence across many subs. And if you are not happy with what the whales have upvoted in a particular sub, you can create a new sub, requiring whales to divide their power to have influence over it. It would be interesting to have blog posts across multiple subs like with tags today, but now also content is upvoted by relevance to a sub (tag/topic/etc), so someone could be flagged for having their blog in the wrong sub but this doesn't affect upvotes/payouts in other subs, but also maybe curators could add/upvote a blog post to other subs the author didn't know existed.
In summary steemit isn't dead, and economically I don't see it dying but given the value of SP relative to how much it is overpowered, the not so interesting content as result of the current whales of SP, no organization of content, I look at it negatively in the short run, but positively in the long run.
A penny for your thoughts? Since that is about as much as my SP gives.