I have read several posts on Steem's lack of user retention as the active user base of 60,000 has not grown this year even though the number have accounts has doubled to over 1 million in the same time frame. I think the issue has to do with the reward system and the unfairness of it. I have been posting on Steemit since the fall of last year (2017) and I find the rewards system does not allocate rewards based on content quality. When I first joined Steemit I had a friend who had quite a lot of Steem worth over $50,000 and this was beneficial as his upvotes made my posts worth $50 or more. If I got other people to upvote my content it seemed irrelevant because their votes were not very powerful and so they didn't make me any money.
With the downturn my friend who held a large amount of Steem began to liquidate his Steem holdings to invest in other cryptocurrencies which was a good strategy because Steem steadily declined this year. Now he has very little Steem and so if he upvotes my content it doesn't make me much money. My recent posts no matter how good they may be are earning very little and so it is easy to become disillusioned with the reward system. The reward system gives too much power to whales and as a result they control the distribution of the reward pool. Though they have the most to lose if the system loses popularity I find they upvote content to suit their needs. Therefore certain authors that are connected to whales get all the rewards while everyone else is left with so little it is not worth publishing content on the system. I think the fact that the content is considered very weak on Steem is a consequence of this flawed reward system. Good content is not being rewarded well enough and therefore it is not bothering to post on Steemit.
Steemit has the potential to be a very powerful social media system, however, it has to reform the reward distribution system because right now it is not working. Some changes I propose are to distribute rewards over more content so that any upvote by a Steemian gives the author some guaranteed reward. This would spread power of the reward pool to more users and thus increase users feelings of being a more fair system. Whales can still have greater reward power but at the moment their power is too concentrated and they are not doing a very good job at selecting the best content being posted on Steemit. Even though it is in their interests to support the best content they are failing in this regard mainly for short term gain by voting for content that they are connected to, such as friends or affiliates.
I am contemplating not posting anymore because the rewards I have been given for recent posts are so low its not worth my time. I think many users are getting the same impression that I am getting and if this continues Steemit will not grow and eventually when a better platform is created it will decline and become irrelevant. The window of opportunity for Steemit to gain share and grow is only so long and I feel if the reward system is not reformed that it will react too slowly to competitive pressures. I think a system can be created that gives all authors some rewards and distributes the rewards over more content so as to help more authors produce content on Steemit. If Steemit can get this right it has the potential to overtake the giants in the social media industry such as Facebook which I believe are vulnerable right now. The fact that users are not continuing to stay and use Steemit even though the number of accounts has increased substantially is a reflection that something needs to be improved on the Steemit system. Clearly the reward system is not rewarding the best content being posted on Steemit and in fact much poor content is getting unfairly rewarded. If the current system does not reform I will not weep when it folds.