RE: The concept of rewardpoolrape is anti-capitalist and anti-free market.
I think this is a misrepresentation of the economics in play here. The rewards pool is not a fixed sum to be divided, but it is constrained by the value of the network and people's willingness to invest in it. That willingness to invest is largely determined by belief that it's sustainable and will continue to grow over the long term.
If people buy Steem exclusively so that they can use it to upvote themselves and direct inflationary rewards from the rewards pool to themselves, then Steem is nothing but a ponzi scheme. That is not a sustainable approach.
In order for Steem to be sustainable, stakeholders must vote to reinvest capital in real productivity by upvoting quality content that helps make this a community worth investing and participating in.
Tesla has been very successful in raising money, and they've invested that money in massive infrastructure expenditures like the gigafactory. Imagine if instead, Tesla had used most of the money they raised from new investment to pay dividends to all their previous shareholders. That's what many people are trying to do with Steem now.
Right now user retention is absolute shit and will continue to be that way until people find reasons to stay here over using other social networks. You know something is wrong when none of those other websites compensate the user, and it means that the network effect here and the content alone is not strong enough of a draw for new users to stay engaged. Also, the necessary "capital" required to interact on the site are essentially pulled after a month, ensuring that people come here, find the content lacking, and even if they attempt to stay are rewarded by not being able to vote or do anything after a month.
Tesla isn't a very good example, they receive big government deals that aren't at play here, but yes they attempt to innovate with some of the money. There are attempts to draw people into the steemit economy with all of the apps that are being created, but apps are plentiful and user attention is not, and if the baseline economic model of the steem coin itself is distasteful to the broader market (as you put it the perception of it being a ponzi scheme used to pay out the big holders) then it will not see greater adoption.
I'm leaving to lending platforms, my marketing is also not appreciated.
I brought a few people here,most think it sucks. I am leaving for equality and love: lending platforms
I've used the example of investors in a broom factory who are lured into investing with the promise they can take brooms from the production as a form of dividend.
Rewards for content creation are the product of Steemit, the mechanism that causes it to grow. Just as a company that has no brooms to sell will prove a bad investment, so will Steemit if rewards are similarly unavailable to deliver to content creators.
We see that Steemit loses ~90% of users YOY.
This is why.
Agreed with you completely. Self voting as the name itself implies related to psychologically speaking with the ego. Self vote crowd are egoistic beings. <3