Vision- An economic system within Steemit that supports new users, rewards constant posters, distributes steem not solely on the whim of 25-50 people, and allows for long term financial gain for investors.
Current status-
Steemit is a steemocracy where the top 1% control 97% of the steem. The corporate account is largely accountable for this as it holds 76M SP where as the larger whales hold on the order of 2.5M. Essentially, the corporate account and the top 30 accounts (which have a lot of Steemit employees) make up 97% of the wealth of steemit in a system that has 100,000 registered users. Steemit doesn't have a 1%. Steemit has a 0.03% that run this place. That's worse than feudalism or modern banking.
Because of this distribution posts that get 200 likes may not get rewarded at all. Posts with 1 like may be rewarded 50 Steem. It creates contention. While flagging is a good thing on the system its misuse totally discourages users. While low prices of steem may encourage people to purchase in at a low price it's more likely that folks find they are more incentivized to spend time elsewhere. Lastly, nothing sucks more than writing a thoughtful post that you spend time on when some dipshit's post about something trivial and meaningless generates 1k, and that's because the whales are scratching each others backs.
For example. I hand make Aggroed's Antidote. That's not a bot. I spend 2-3 hours reviewing my FB news feed. Eliminate trash and find gems. Then I take 30+ minutes to post those gems into a fairly organized news page. If I attribute say 1 hours worth of work to the post (as opposed to just my curiosity) and it gets rewarded at 50 Steem, which is now worth $17 that's ok, but honestly my time is better spent elsewhere from a strictly financial perspective. For starters, I don't know if my posts that sometimes get rewarded will continue to get rewarded and so there is inherently much more risk to spending an hour doing Steemit work than say mowing a lawn.
Soltuions
I was recently inspired by to write this post and think of more solutions. Honestly, I've already put together 7-8 posts about this, but here is my most serious attempt yet to fix the issues at hand.
1. Give away Steem from the corporate account as per
2. Delegate Steem from large accounts into smaller accounts. Whales can manage this on their own with the right function in the program. The big corporate account could have a witness vote style approach where people put together proposals for SP from the corporate account for specific purposes for specific periods of time.
For example- I want to spread Peace, Abundance, and Liberty if they delegated me 1-3M steem I could ensure people that write articles relating to those things could be rewarded and thus see more content like that up here attracting that audience to spend their precious time here. This method could allow the corporate account to grow through curation too (maybe split it 50/50 with the designated curator and the corporate account). Also, since more people would have large power votes this would help decrease the power of a handful of whales and employees and be more reflective of the actual community that's been created here.
3. Hire authors with Steem. You don't have to pay cash. You could promise authors set rewards for continuous posts from folks who will draw an audience.
4. Buy stuff with Steem. People can barter stuff for steem so that the whales and corporate account can power down without dropping the price of steem. They still get rewarded.
5. Price of Steem is going down because more people are selling it then buying it and no one trusts that it will reverse because of the steem distribution and no end in site of whales selling. I think you need to get a professional team of Steem sellers acting like stock brokers. So, create a way to give commissions to people that want to sell Steem all day. They can call contacts etc and find people willing to purchase Steem like a stock broker might. If you can get the investment class in this country to purchase Steem that's a bigger effect than the whales pushing the price down so you'll see an increase in price. This will help more people migrate here because if their 50 Steem is now worth $150 USD you'll see more activity.
6. To make something like 5 easier you have to be able to convert steem to USD with a credit card or modern banking rather than resorting to trading through bitcoin. Real investors don't want to eff around with converting multiple times especially when folks in the middle just take value out more than once. How can you help make trading SD for USD happen?
7. Central support of curation. Make bots and programs for us to help us make our own project Curie. Help us get rewarded for good content creation and content curation.
Conclusions
Overall, people don't like systems like this where the distribution is broken and the folks at the top have all of it. If you haven't been paying attention that's why America itself is going through such horrible times. We have a central banks that's been ruining our economy and shoving wealth at a top class. Does that sound familiar?
To fix this you have to fix the distribution, raise the price of steem by helping to sell it, and either destroy, trade, or delegate the fat stack sitting in the corporate account.
And the mandatory counter argument-
I don't do that because Facebook is a shit hole that has so much censorship it's unreal and this place is cool and can be salvaged for sure. Steem might also drop to pennies making this place no better than say blogspot. Let's hope this cool place gets turned around.
URGENT: You don't have tons of time for this. Everything you want to do will get harder as the price of steem drops. So, you gotta move!