Quote from: dottom on July 21, 2017, 03:12:12 PM

July 21, 2017 update for those following this thread.

The Steemit supporters seem to be celebrating the success of Steemit (200k users, 14k new posts per day), but the Steemit pyramid will come to an end soon. Here's why:

1. Rewards now are very little, often $0.00 or $0.01 for new users even with some upvotes. Because there is a fixed rewards pool, the rush of new users are all competing for that slice. While a year ago you could earn some decent $ posting even as an average user without the luck of a whale upvoting, now even with a dolphin account upvoting your post, you'll get make 10 cents. Motivation is not there to post.

2. Getting visibility and followers is really hard. They call it the grind - interacting with the community, building relationships, getting followers, aka social networking. But with 14k posts per day and growing, all the posts scroll past the first page in each tag so quickly, you get very little visibility. The success stories are the users who already have 100k+ followers on Youtube and bring them over. But those followers will give up after a week or two when they realize they can't earn much $ as an average user.

3. Since hard fork 19 (HF19), the dolphin and whale accounts are motivated to upvote themselves. The ability to earn $ curating other posts is very small compared to just upvoting your own posts or comments. This makes it harder for new users to earn and be discovered (one of the original premises of the platform).

4. There's a lot of crappy content. If you have 100k Steem Power and a few thousand followers, you need to churn out 2-4 posts a day to make your $100 to $300. The whale accounts that do upvote others tend to upvote the same few accounts, kind of like the 1% only doing business with other 1%ers. Good content is going unnoticed and crappy content such as bad memes, a few lines, reposting old videos, etc. earn $100+.

5. Bots, bots, bots. Some bots are good when they post useful comments or make upvotes to help new users, but most of the bots are just whale accounts auto-voting to maximize their rewards daily. Take the human interactions and curation out (even if they were limited due to the above reasons) and even fewer new users will earn rewards.

Conclusion: Steemit has a pyramid-like dependency on new money coming into steem to prop up the price. Users will start dropping off and new investors who may have looked to buy steem will shy away because it's too hard to earn now. It was a good ride for a few people who made $100k or more, early whale accounts made 7 figures. Time to power down before the other whales do and tank the price.

P.S.: If steem drops back down to 10-cents, do you buy in and try to ride a rebirth?

This is a good write up highlighting some of the issues Steem is facing. Thanks for the update.