Jerry, I'm voting for you as witness. But the man above has a point.
The primary attractiveness of using Steemit instead of something else is the lack of censorship. The rewards are there, first of all, to restrict spam by giving it a greater opportunity cost, and create the incentive structure for decentralized archiving.
Nobody throws out money. Content printed on money is archived. But that doesn't work if the money isn't worth much, and if there's little content being added to increase its worth.
The weird tit-for-tat and pay-to-spam, spam-to-win strategies dominating the site are keeping the value of steem relatively low, user retention low, etc. There are 200,000 more accounts now in March than in back in December. But according to bandwidth, there are fewer active users posting content.
I'm a scientist. Yet as I've told Ned a month or so ago, I can get almost nobody else in academia to come use the platform. And why not? Why despite all the potential? Simply because serious people don't play games.
Serious people don't play games. They invest. Or they create content. Also they consume content. But they don't play games. Nobody with any face will come here only to risk getting flagged and losing face. When they can invest in private placements, why would they invest in order to be able to reverse a flag and clean up the site . . . This is likely why most celebrities and academics are not coming over to use Steemit. Even though the rewards for a far smaller number of subscribers, readers, etc, are far greater here . . .
The various weird and aggressive and pointless flagging games practiced by some of the other large users open up the door to censorship by paid activists in the future. They set a precedent. It's not a good precedent they set. You've already experienced the friendly good nature, erm, of several of these, eh, gentlemen, I see.
Consider doing something about it. You can probably join we-resist, or organize something yourself, and help make the site more attractive to serious users. You have the SP, which right now is still worth something. Remember what Solzhenitsyn said.
The entire value of the steem token is based on proof of brain.
It's based content, not mining. So anything that results in the nonviability of professional content creation eliminates the value of the token. Which creates a problem for valuation. And for investing.
And it matters little for content creators whether censorship comes from Youtube or Twitter the company or anonymous individuals, and discourages them from using this platform rather than some other one. And then it's rather hard to prove brain to a consensus, I suggest, when there's no brain to prove and no consensus, and when there are few users and therefore no security, no archiving, and no platform.
RE: Steem Witness Roadmap for @jerrybanfield in 2018!