I've been meaning to write a post about this for some time, I believe it is something people ought to know about before they decide to trust other entities on the platform.
This particular post will mostly be about one change that sort of enables this and has been available for a long time if users were savvy enough to use it. This post of course isn't meant to portray these services negatively as they are part of this technology and the freedoms it brings.
The change from payouts occurring once a day to once every week instead brought a giant stop to a lot of abuse, but abuse can never be stopped completely, no matter a centralized or decentralized platform. The difference between the platforms is that one of them can directly take your account from you and along with it all funds, this is one of the few advantages to centralized services in accordance with abuse.
As long as Steem has being sold on decentralized exchanges such as Bitshares and exchanges that only require an email to sign up and use like Binance it has allowed for a lot of dishonesty and shady businesses. Bear in mind that other exchanges have operated the same way until they started requiring KYC. Why this matters is that anyone can now create accounts, either through Steemit or AnonSteem, deposit Steem from exchanges without link to your ID and start anything on Steem. As this isn't a problem in general it allows for anonymous users to operate and stay deceptive for longer without being caught of any transactions going to the same deposit memo addresses.
Although the need has kind of decipated since delegating for max ROI to bid bots or distribution bots exists now meaning these cases don't necessarily care about self-voting 100% a day and hiding their alt accounts, we now instead have to be careful with dapps and their developers. I realize that many are aware of these things and often invest anyway cause they feel its not a lot to lose for them, to others it may not be obvious to be careful and do your own research.
I don't want to mention any particular dapp as without proof that's just a baseless accusation. Imagine though a dapp that does something sensitive with transactions and value. It may promise a lot, grow in attention through buying votes and opening a community, use the community for max momentum and then suddenly they are just gone with everyone's current and future investments that trusted them with Steem or delegations.
It's not impossible but rather quite probable. The effort required to get everything going and use the community for most of the work in promises of future tokens or shares can get a lot of the ground work done while the bad actor is not wasting a lot of time but instead building empty promises to have it last as long as possible.
Even though this is an amazing feature to be able to support someone's views and plans instantly and get rewarded for it back one way or another and on Steem you can do it with delegations instead of risking your actual coins. I am also sure that this will continue to bring a lot of new developers over and the price will naturally grow to be able to support all dapps if they have found decent ways of monetizing things and having a healthy economy that is provided both by the pool and outside sources. The people still need to be careful with this though.
They are the ones taking the risk by losing out on inflation or a higher stake in another successful dapp. Delegation will work a lot like diversifying into SMT's in the near future, I am personally looking forward to that and especially on a platform like Steem that will be able to fight off projects that seem fishy and only there to leech off rewards from the pool. If other projects don't want to join our platform to discuss things without censorship then we will show them how well it works for us and the creations of the dapps on our blockchain. We are doing quite well right now compared to other giant blockchains with enormous investments and it will only keep improving.
It's also going to be interesting once we start getting bigger names that want to start their businesses on Steem, who do you think will be the first ones? They'd probably receive quite decent chunk of delegation if they were to jump into Steem right about now, wouldn't they? If the idea is any decent of course. I want to finish this post with saying that I am quite happy with some of the major dapps we have on Steem today and I am really looking forward to see them grow once blockchain is more common in the world and people are checking it out more and more. The best dapps will probably be those that start bringing users in before that happens without them even knowing they are using the Steem blockchain until a door opens up for them showing them the Steem world full of dapps at your disposal.