There are a few little minor issues of PAL of course, like their hastily modified Steem front-end that only shows PAL, but there's one major issue that kinda annoys me.
To use my PAL that I Staked, I have to be on the PAL interface, voting on PAL posts. This means that everyone who chooses to use PAL can still get votes from the rest of Steem, but they only vote on PAL posts, unless after checking their followed list they don't find enough things to upvote, and decide to check the rest of Steem. Then, they sort of waste that PAL voting power for a few votes.
It kinda sucks.
This means that all of those that are using PAL have an advantage when it comes to votes from other PAL users. But those not using PAL have a distinct disadvantage...unless they use the palnet tag.
Frankly, I'm not quite sure if this is more bad for Steem than it is good for PALnet.
The idea behind PAL is pretty cool. I'm not sure if making a walled off garden is that great of an idea though.
What's the real advantage of using PAL over any of the clones that are bound to come? What if a game community comes about? Wouldn't gamers rather use that? Then they'd have all the other gamers using that interface, more likely to upvote them.
But then what happens when there's 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 different communities, all walled off, giving their own coins?
That would be really bad for Steem I think. It would be really bad for the users. It would be good for new users that come here just for one community, but then they would only be experiencing a very small part of Steem.
I think we'll likely have to develop interfaces that can award any coin that a user has, and show users from any of the many communities.
Other than offering it's own coin that means you can earn more possibly, I'm not sure about the real draw of PAL. There's nothing that amazingly great to make people choose it over clones that might come and do things their own way.
I think that perhaps niche communities will show up doing similar to what PAL does. What happens then? Does everyone sell all their PAL at lower and lower rates? Do they continue development hoping for a spike in price sometime? Do they end up having their own fans and slowly adding more and more unique features until there are clear reasons to use PAL over anything else?
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