Steemit has the potential to be a great community. Now, that's not to say that it currently isn't great, just like a baby can be a great baby, but it isn't a great doctor. Not yet. Time will tell if it grows into something wonderful that does a lot of good for the world, or if it ends up dropping out of college to live in a van and sell sandals made of old tires.
As of this writing, the top ten posts on the front page of steemit have to do with:
6) Steemit
2) Anarchy
2) Other (life and intro)
An outsider coming to Steemit sees...what exactly? A bunch of posts, worth tens of thousands of dollars that are talking about the site (many of which are talking about how they made money on the site). I'm not saying that Steemit is bad, or that anarchy is bad, but the fact of the matter is that the posts that an outsider sees may not be the best representation of Steemit.
Lets compare Steemit to Walmart.
No seriously, stick with me on this for a minute.
Walmart was originally designed by Sam Walton, who wanted to offer great prices and service to his customers. with the early success of walmart, he was able to grow to many states and countries around the world. Walmart uses its buying power to keep prices low for people its consumers. Sam Walton was even famous for driving around a 1979 for pick up truck, long after being a multi millionaire. The corruption and greed that we often associate with walmart now is not something that was part of the original vision. The Waltons as they are today are pretty despicable people, penny pinching their staff, offering lower quality to their customers, and all so they can add another billion to their account. The goal of Walmart seems to be to pay their staff so little that they can only afford to shop at Walmart, so they are, in effect, double dipping on their own employees.
Sam cared about the people, not the profit. The profit was a byproduct of the people that shopped and worked at Walmarts.
In comparison, Steemit was invented to care about the content creators that make up its userbase. It's designed to reward them for their content and the loyalty that they have. These rewards come in the form of an immediate financial payout (that can be converted to steempower or easily converted to bitcoins/ which can be turned into any currency) and long term steempower, which gives you more say in the direction of steemit. When referring back to the frequent top posts of steemit, it feels as though those top posts are doing the same as the current owners of Walmart, double dipping on the posts ABOUT steemit to get cash and more flow over the direction of steemit, which flows right into more posts about steemit.
The point I'm trying to make is, with the highest posts getting the power, and the highest posts all being based on Steemit; Is Steemit simply a snake that is eating its own body?
Users having a financial stake in the system is good thing. It helps to connect us to the site that we use and the other users on the site. Coming here purely for the financial gain of steemit is pulling power out of the system, and it will start to eat away at itself. This isn't to say people shouldn't spend the money, but maybe there is a different way.
If anyone has suggestions on better ways to distribute the steem, fire away. But here's a method that I think may work.
1) Cap all post Steem Dollar Payouts. This could be a $100 cap, or $1000 cap, but somewhere in between makes sense. A $250 cap on Steem Dollars for a post isn't a bad thing.
2) Convert all other post payout to Steem Power.
3) Distribute Steem Power from posts to those that upvote it in a higher amount, say 40%.
So a post on the front page would still show $10,000 and still pay out that much. The poster would receive $250 steem dollars. of the remaining $9,750 worth of steem, the poster would have $5850 worth of steem added to their Steem Power. The Remaining $3900 would be distributed (in steem power) between the people that voted for the content (still distributed based on current steem power).
This may encourage people to simply upvote the top post, but could simply reject voting on current top posts. And it may encourage people to simply vote on every post. Instead, limit people to 10 votes per day.
A system like this will encourage people to actively engage with other users and see more content on Steemit. It will help to form new communities and take away the 'easy money' posts of steem (which this post seems to ironically fall into). It will hopefully help to balance the scales of the greedy posts that frankly don't seem interested in joining the community so much as pumping out a few grand and turning tail and leaving. It may not be the best system, but its a step in the right direction.
All this brings me back to the title of the post, Should I stay or should I go? I like the bones of this community, but if this community is going to simply be dictated by the few powerful users and become cannibalized by the powerful, then its not something I really want to stick around in.