First Impression Feedback (Great, but Confusing!) & Questions

Hello STEEM community! I love the idea of a social platform based on an un-manipulatable blockchain that rewards users for their contributions. But after creating my first post (How To Store Bitcoin in Stainless Steel), my first impression is that I'm still very confused about everything. A lot of these questions would probably be answered after I spend some time here, but I wanted to write it down while it's fresh--I hope it's taken as helpful and not critical. By way of introduction, my real name is Scott, and I make videos explaining bitcoin and other technology. My most popular video is How Bitcoin Works in 5 Minutes.

Steem vs Steem Dollars vs Steem Power

I read through the FAQ, several explanatory posts, and even the white paper, and I'm still fairly confused about these. Details aside, this is my main feedback. Those concepts are not only confusing, but intimidating.

• If I only have Steem, do my votes count for anything? How much SP do I need to say, make a post earn about $1? What percentage of people have that much?
• When does that delegated SP go away?
• When do I need Steem Dollars? (Promoting my post... anything else?)
• How do Steem Dollars maintain their peg? (Just interest rate payment adjustments, or can SBD be printed? The price for Steem is currently 1.08+, I get that interest rates can drive up the price, but what drives it down?)
• Which is the best to hold on to for long term growth? (SP gets fixed interest, but Steem may go up many times if the market values it like Bitcoin, countered by the 10% inflation...)
• It'd be great if some of the WHY information contained in the whitepaper showed up in the FAQ. Like, SP exists so that people can't move money around quickly to upvote content with lots of different accounts (?).

I wonder if the whole system could use the concepts but hide the details. For instance, instead of converting to SP, just have a certain amount of my Steem locked / vested. And on the dollar side, rather than having a stability coin in the system, just show me my account value using the latest price in dollars. When I buy / sell on coinbase, I can just type in dollars and it converts for me.

Getting Started

I signed up on a Saturday but my account didn't get approved until Monday. I understand that Steemit, Inc. is giving real money for every account, so there needs to be a process. I read in the FAQ you can setup anonymous accounts by self funding through other sites, I would have been happy to do that if there was a link from the signup page. This seems like a big barrier to entry for, say, someone wanting to signup just to comment.

Writing My First Post

I was panicked at first because I didn't notice that my post was being saved as a draft. I now see a little "draft saved" text pop up. Maybe have a "drafts" section to make this clearer?

Rewards

• Does my post only pay out according to how many likes / votes it gets in the first 7 days? Most of the content I create doesn't become valuable until months or years later. That video I linked at the top earned its highest ad revenue just last month, over 3 years after publication.
• Do number of views count, or just upvotes? And only upvotes from whales? For lots of my content, I buy $10-$100 of adwords to get it noticed by "whales" on the internet, that is, curation sites, etc. On Steem, if I bought a lot of external views, would those help me at all? On a first pass, it seems that bringing in external visitors doesn't benefit me except in that it increases the value of Steem if they join and contribute--which is great, but very roundabout.

Promoted

It'd be great if there were a way to understand how much visibility spending, say, $10 gets my post. I can get an idea by looking at the promoted costs of the posts on the promoted page, but having that info when you're typing in an amount would be helpful.

Tipping

I found it incredibly interesting to read about the rationale for not having tipping in the white paper--that there's a cost in simply deciding whether to spend money, so if you force people to make that decision for a simple upvote, they'll never upvote. On the other hand, sometimes content is incredibly valuable, and I'm happy to send someone a beer ($5-$10). It'd be great to have that option. It feels like the Steem Power system is a roundabout way for me to actually tip... it's just very unclear how it all gets connected. How much SP do I need so that one of my upvotes is actually worth $1?

Centralization Questions

• Who runs Steemit.com, approves new accounts, and hosts images?
• What percentage of Steem / SP / SBD do Steemit founders currently own?

Misc

• I'd love the ability to follow tags or topics, and not just authors.
• Is there a way to see most popular posts of all time in a given topic? Or do a search and sort by views?
• Show popular tags or autocomplete on story creation page.

Love the Idea :)

After reading the white paper, I'm amazed by the incredible amount of thought that went into the system design, figuring out how to incentivize growth, reward people for contributions, pay for bandwidth, prevent abuse, etc. Looking forward to seeing how the system evolves!