I think the real revelation of what Dan created is that most people are clueless in maths.
This is not a revelation and it is indeed a flaw. If you only want to appeal to math-oriented investors who think things through in that manner, then you are okay, but you won't appeal to investors who look at a price chart, see a declining trend and stop there.
Is this a fatal flaw? I don't know. In competitive markets small differences can lead to winner-take-all outcomes. A similar design that doesn't repulse less-math-oriented investors (and is neutral for math-oriented-investors) might do better. The higher cost of capital that results from narrowing the investor market is a disadvantage (likewise for cutting out medium-term investors as iamnotback has stated many times).
While I think changes will be coming at some point, to tune the economy, I also think that the rule which says "
Simplicity is key" will again be overlooked. What they are trying to do is admittedly complex and trying to make it work while also making it simple (-if it's even a goal-) is not an easy task. However it's what will be required of them and whether they are up to it or not, may decide -in large part- the degree of success the platform has. As you say, small things can make a difference.
@smooth IMO you are overthinking it w.r.t. small differences leading to a runaway winner-take-all. Rather I think it will be a different concept that wins. IMO the problems with Steem are not small flaws that can be tweaked.
I don't think that investors and users misunderstanding the math of Steem has anything to do with why it is failing. Rather the entire concept is not only complex but it works against the desirable attributes such as speculation, adoption, ecosystem investment, etc.. We'll see if I am wrong when the first batch of serious ecosystem projects for the Steem blockchain are launched (again I am expecting the voting reward model and the 40 whales top-down control will limit the range of ecosystem projects).
And @AlexGR afaics there isn't some simple change that can made to change the trajectory of what currently appears to be Steem's failure. IMO it will require a totally different incentive system for onboarding and massive ecosystem reason for an acceleration of adoption. Meaning that there will be people creating new things in a free market of proliferation. Imagine the growth of the WWW from 1996 forward. It was the ability of the ecosystem to independently and without permission (permissionless system) put up websites and make investments in the WWW, that caused its explosive adoption and growth. Nobody owned and controlled the WWW. Everyone had the trust to build on the WWW and assume it would remain a level playing field (to some extent that trust is being eroded lately which is why the Internet is stagnating in some facets and we need new things which is why I am working on new platforms).
Why do you think I am creating a programming language. There is a lot of deep stuff that needs to be done to drive an ecosystem.
Ethereum developed a language, but afaics it didn't solve any problems that drives a huge ecosystem. In fact, it was reputed to be one of the aspects that encouraged the DAO bug.
The WWW was a new platform. A new set of protocols and languages to drive new functionality, i.e. HTTP, HTML, CSS, etc..