When Steem and steemit.com were first released, growth was explosive because for the first time it was possible for a community of like-minded people to congregate on the Internet on a platform that they could earn a stake in.
It was also possible to get curated by humans instead of bots, whales even! People would actually read your posts and vote for them if they liked them. Lots of people would see it and upvote it if they liked it. There was real interaction. It was beautiful! I loved it so much. Then came the bidbots. Now the beauty is gone. It is replaced by greed. Votes are sold to the highest bidder. The crowdsourced content discovery mechanism has been completely undermined and it could have been prevented. A culture against vote selling could have been and could still be established, but not while Steemit Inc. endorses it.
From these experiments we learned that, yes, a blockchain could be used to store social information, distribute tokens among community members by leveraging crowdsourced stake-weighted voting (a/k/a Proof-of-Brain), and this could be done in a way that supports the bootstrapping of a digital currency. Over one million accounts created, 50,000 daily active users, and a token featured on many exchanges is proof that a community-backed token can deliver a ton of value.
This is not what happens anymore. It's not about PoB anymore.
Although the changes for Communities will roll out in phases, the end result will be every bit as disruptive as the original release of the Steem blockchain.
Except for the thing that was disruptive in the beginning is now gone. How can you even still pay homage to PoB when you have allowed bid bots to completely undermine that system?
One of the keys to Steem’s success is the fact that it has the unique capability to autonomously align the incentives of community members. We are all so passionate about Steem, because we have all worked so hard to add value to this ecosystem, and have received some amount of stake for our efforts. But again, not everyone is interested in Steem, let alone capable of adding value to it.
Some have worked hard to extract value from the system and have been greatly rewarded for their efforts.
In order to really scale Steem, we have to not just create features that allow communities to form around non-Steem interests, we need to enable those Communities to determine for themselves who is adding value, and reward those people with stake in that community. That’s where Smart Media Tokens come in, which we will discuss in a future post.
That's all well and good, but why do we want to try to add value while others extract it? Even if we have communities that don't have delegation and have a culture against vote selling, it will still dominate Steem and be counter productive to what those communities are trying to do.
We invite anyone with ideas, suggestions, or questions about how we can make Communities work for all Steem developers, to share their thoughts in the comment section below.
You could help to establish a culture that downvotes bid bots. It's probably too late to get rid of delegation now that it's the main way to earn here. You could make a return to PoB on steemit.com - the fire hose for all the communities. You could quit programmatically selling STEEM and crashing the price. You could make the trending page actually posts that are trending instead of just posts that have just paid their way to get there which are basically just a weird form of ads. But I'm guessing this isn't the type of feedback you're looking for and won't even give me a meaningful reply to my comment.
RE: Part 2 of Our Plan to Onboard the Masses