First statistics after launch, and a bit of a perspective on roi, value, downvotes and so on

A full week has passed since our official launch (and the initial big delegation), so we're ready to share some statistics!

We have attracted a group of about 20 curators from all over the world. Covering most of the timezones allows us to keep the queue fed nearly 24 hours a day and spread our votes into the most secluded regions.

Those curators have distributed 729 upvotes over 618 accounts during the last 7 days. The average efficiency moves around 50%, which is actually better than initially expected. Due to the focus on maximizing rewards for the community instead of the delegators, which is done by voting at 100% VP instead of instant upvotes at the most profitable time, it's a great result that we get the average 50% of our vote value as a return!
With the current numbers, we will yield a bit more than 10% of the combined delegations per year. After substracting the share the curators receive for their work, that means ~8.2% for delegators, slightly topping the initial expectation of 7-8%!

Some people say those numbers are too low, and it's possible to make a lot more from your Steem Power. And as for now, they are right. Newsteem is spreading awareness day by day though, and more and more people start joining the efforts to stop the value extractors and help making steem what it was intended to be - a platform that distributes its inflation to contributors, not passive investors. The focus is on bid bots and the powerful voting circles for now, but after they've been dealt with it'll go down to the smaller abuses cases. As every steem someone takes out for his "investment" prevents content creators to get their share, and in the end drives them off, these efforts help the whole of the platform to grow and appreciate in price.
We do our part in targeting some of the biggest and also some smaller abusers with our downvotes, decided on freely (as long as reasonable) by the delegators. We also maintain a blacklist of users who take part in self voting circles, and we are blocking all recent vote buyers. We strongly believe in organic determination of value, and anyone interfering with that system will not get a vote from us.

The blacklist will be made public and searchable in a while, so users who participated in these circles in the past can check if they were listed and approach us to get removed when they changed their ways.
Vote buyers will probably soon receive a comment under their post that they missed out on a vote to appreciate their content by forcing appreciation with their wallet.
It's still a long way to reach the change in consciousness that can help make steem great, but we trust in the community to work together to make it happen!