I'm going to share with you my radical vision of what Steemit could be, but first, let me get something off my chest!
"What? You, Steemgoblin? You have something to say?"
Imagine that! Right?
Yeah, okay, I'm outspoken,but it don't mean I'm wrong!
Among the things that have been impacted by the trend toward paying for payouts, (vote buying) reputation scores shouldn't be one of them, but do not be fooled.
There is only one factor increasing or decreasing reputation scores, and it's...
Drumroll please!
VOTES!
That's right one more thing that is for sale here in anarchocapital land, reputation! Nice, huh?
Here's how the reputation score works, though. For every point you gain, you'll need 10x as many votes as you needed for the last one! That means that a 61 is 10x as impressive as a 62. Did you know that? So, when you see these guys strolling around with a (70) ahem,
, know that they've earned their bones,or spent a lot to make you think so.
In my opinion, this like many other things, should be a combined score, including, perhaps an average number of comments per post, replies to posts, weight upvotes on comments more highly than on posts?
It just seems to me that making this up for grabs to the highest bidder, makes the one and only "earned" statistic on the site almost as worthless as the vote counts and payouts. And, I'm still sitting here saying, credible, quality, evergreen content, that adds something to the readers life, ESPECIALLY outside of Steemit, is what we need.
Let me tell you a little story.
If you were old enough to be using the internet to search for "how to" articles about eight years ago, you will recall a site called "Ehow.com". It is quite possibly the biggest cautionary tale of the SEO wars.
Ehow was owned by a company named Demand Media. They hired a bunch of content producers to crank out howto material by the bushel. They had a list of thousands of topics and for 350 words, they'd pay anywhere from $12-$20.
And they did have editorial standards, so a lot of it was decent stuff.
But, they got too big
Over the course of about two and a half years, if you searched "how to" for any damn thing, the top two or three options in search results, were on Ehow.com. The problem was, they didn't pay the toll!
Google is a particularly pernicious beast. It rewards those that toe the line and send them money, but it does not necessarily reward success, hard earned. While Ehow was getting these results almost entirely organically, due to the huge volume of content, Google wanted a bigger cut of the profits. Ehow was turning into an adwords juggernaut, but the money was going in, not going out.
Then came the algorithm wars.
Eventually, as anyone in SEO can tell you, Google worked the system until organic results no longer took the top spots, paid advertising is what you almost always see topping even the "under the line" listings under the promoted entries.
Long tail keywords became the last resort of those trying to build a legit audience.
Ehow died.
While their content is still online, even searching specific titles of their work rarely brings results anymore. Tweaks in the algorithm, coupled with the haze of time (who thought "most recent" should be the best way to judge relevance? DUH!) has all but obliterated them in search results.
They were touted as the biggest "content farm" and thousands of writers lost good paying gigs as they slowly cranked down production and shifted their focus.
So, what am I trying to say?
We could be the next "Ehow", but in a good way!
With 250k pieces being added to this single domain every 24 hours, we are one of the fastest growing planets in the interverse!! Imagine if even half of that content was well written, properly constructed, optimized educational content! We could be bigger than Facebook! (the world's largest collection of random links and memes, struggling for relevancy)
That level of content would be drawing more and more quality content producers!
And I'm not talking about the YouTube heads that bop in here with a built-in audience of 5 million! (some of them are great! but many only feed their audience on steemit, crypto, steemit, and more steemit!) I'm talking about makers, indie film producers, small record labels, high quality podcasters, people who make real content, for the real world!
And, to be fair, we're getting a few of them in now, but not like we could be!
So, 
NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH!
If people came here and found reams of seriously good, useful content, instead of small pockets, surrounded by oceans of floating garbage, they would be inclined to take us more seriously. And what does that mean?
Let's do a little exercise in logic, shall we?
We know there is a limited prize pool for each 24 hour period. The steem blocks are produced at a specific rate and 75% of it comes here for us to battle it out over. It's locked in. We cannot increase it.
BUT WAIT!
What if there was a way to raise the reward pool to a billion dollars a day?
Every day, the reward pool percentage of new steem comes to 48,029.695, at today's price that is
$186,355.22 USD
Or about $0.75 per post. So, if you're doing better than this, pat yourself on the back!
But what if that pool jumped to 1 BILLION dollars?
Right
It's crazy, so crazy, it just might work!
If there is anything we know, it's that bitcoin has opened up a brave new world, a world, where a coin, based on trust in a blockchain ledger, can rise to $20k per share!
And here's where this gets interesting! Ready??
If the price of steem rises to $20,820.45, the daily reward pool=1Billion!
Okay, so do the math, let's say at that point, there are a hundred million pieces of content a day being created, each of them would be worth an average $10!
But, that's not going to happen! That would equal more than all the pages being added to the entire interverse daily as we speak!
So, let's say it was ten million! Okay, each post averages out to, $100.00!!
But,
First of all, if you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right!
But seriously, I know this is unlikely in the near future. There are, however, predictions, that some find credible that it could rise to $15k by the end of 2018. What would that mean?
The Reward Pool Could Grow to $72.04 MILLION DOLLARS A DAY!
WTF??
Even if the volume of content increases 10x each post would average $30! If it grew 100x, to 25 million, the average post would still be worth almost $3!
But, before I finish, let's see a slightly more reasonable goal, shall we? Since we know the price is driven by supply and demand, and the supply is steady, it won't get more scarce, until demand increases.
If steem goes to $33 a share, 10x current levels, (a daily pool of almost $1.6 MILLION dollars in value!) and content doubles, each post would be worth an average $3.16!!
You can see why it makes sense for someone like 
That's why I think it's time to stop competing for peanuts and set our eyes on a bigger prize. Sure, you're going to need to have SP, absolutlely, but when your little vote gets multiplied 10x over, you could earn $50k annually from as little as 3 or 4000 SP, upvoting your own two posts a day.
(this is based on the fact that the pool of SP will grow at the same rate, only the price of individual coins will rise.)
I think this is what is called for:
- Good content producers need to produce for an audience outside steemit, at least in part.
- Content should be created to add value to life outside the digital world.
- Curators should begin to promote content that fits these parameters.
- Less "steemit is great!" content will be needed as time goes by.
- Outside promotion of steemit posts should be increasing!
- Add a link to the steemit signup at the ends of posts!
If we can shift our focus to becoming the next "ehow" (in volume, not style, quality, or type of content) by creating steem content to appeal to an outside audience, we can grow the platform, increase demand for steem, and raise the price!