I had an interesting discussion at SteemFest where we were talking about stake-based witness voting. My view is that as important as it is, there is a factor that many people tend not to consider.
Currently, Freedom is the largest single witness vote and is able to heavily influence the order of the top 30 but this doesn't necessarily mean influence the witnesses themselves. To influence the decision making of witnesses requires having a voice, being able to inject ideas into the witness group for consideration and implementation. Without this voice, stake alone is a difficult tool of influence development decisions. I would suspect that despite Freedom's rather muted profile, they do in fact have a voice somewhere to input ideas.
Last night I posted an article broaching the subject of locking up stake for a guaranteed return (read through the comments) and one of the things that came up was, what if everyone locked up their stake? I don't see this happening because for many users, there is little benefit in locking stake and for users for myself, there are other things to consider.
I just bought more STEEM. Not a great deal and since I don't have fiat to spend, I had to sell something else in order to do so. The reason I bought it is because I believe that in the long run, that STEEM is going to outperform the other investment. However, in order for it to do so it requires the Steem community to be successful. I am pretty sure that it is going to be because people are willing to discuss and implement for a future where it is.
I wouldn't lock up my stake (at least most of it) to earn even if I could earn 100% on 10x votes daily because I care about the platform itself. I care about onboarding and eventual user retention. My stake could be my voice as much as my actual voice is when I have a chance to communicate with investors and witnesses. Currently, my staked voice is insignificant, irrelevant.
I can spend 10 flags a day on 10 over-rewarded shitposts in Trending and have absolutely zero influence over them. A 2 dollar vote is not going to make their earnings negative, it is hardly going to be felt on a 500-1500 dollar reward. However, take that massive reward away and bring Trending back to 20-50 dollars and suddenly my flag is meaningful again, it will be felt. Of course, without the ability to buy votes Trending will have far fewer shitposts filling its feed as they wil now rely on organic votes and friends. Chronic bidbotters rarely have a lot of friends willing to vote them for curation return alone.
What this means is that whatever is left of the pool after those who want to lock their stake do so will be controlled by people like me, people who desire good content, people who want people to be rewarded, people who want people to benefit from the system. It means that the remaining portion that is left in the pool has a soft reset of the distribution potential and is now the active force that dictates the entire public view of Steem.
As I said to 
50/50 curation scares a lot of people because it sounds a lot like authors are giving up rewards but that is far from the case. Instead, it is a much more natural (in my opinion) process of active investors having a voice in what the future of Steem will look like. Again as I said to
In my opinion, my voice in developing a healthy view of Steem is worth more to my holdings than a 10x vote return.
I am closing in on 30,000 Steem mostly earned on platform or traded back and forth for over the last 2 years. By far the most value adding thing to my Steem would be for price to increase a lot and I don't see how that is going to happen under the current situation other than through market pumps and dumps. I want some stability and sustainability in the future and the way to do that is to spend the time and energy actively creating an environment that is supportive of the authors and the apps that will attract and retain users.
Remember that a current major draw card to apps is their delegations and ability to reward users which means that the apps won't lock stake. If anything, Steemit is likely to find more apps and hopefully community curation initiatives to delegate free stake to in order for them to distribute Steem to the active community. There is no guarantee this will happen but as 
This means that Steemit can inject a lot more draw on the pool through delegations to apps, the apps can attract many more users to distribute to and when SMTs are released, each will have a strong user base and track record of development to become standalone products. The delegations could slowly be reduced as the apps grow in strength and new apps coming in can take new delegations. It also means that initiatives like, 
There are lots of things to think about of course but for me, having the ability to actually have a say in the Steem ecosystem, to be able to affect posts significantly through both votes and flags and support the continually expanding range of app options is going to be far more valuable to me for my own value. Having the ability to continue to earn in a similar way to those I vote on takes pressure off me to actually earn through my own posting and instead spend more time on the community aspects and, using my voice.
Before SteemFest I mentioned I was going there to sort out a few things, understand my place in the community and I am still on that path however, there is a slightly clearer direction than before. I don't worry about everyone locking up their stake because I already know people who won't and they aren't necessarily the smallest users. There are many, many people who care about the future of this platform and the community that populates it and I would love to see a time where they can actually be seen, where there voices can actually be heard without the maximizers crowding them out.
For those here now and arriving, the view of the ecosystem would hopefully be much healthier and reset expectations not only on earnings but, what is considered good enough for visibility. The curation groups would have a much larger say and the many smaller users with some level of stake will be able to use their voice to both reward users, earn and disagree with rewards at a much more influential level. In time, the voices that are able to get traction and rise from the group will become community leaders, key users and future attractors rather than be unseen, buried, lost.
When it comes to the details of actual change, that is up to the numbers people, the witnesses and the data divers to work out what would be the most likely path forward but, the pressure for change should come from the community itself.
Your voice is worth something, and it is worth a lot more than a few votes.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
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