An open letter to our illustrious leader and current users.

That video was so painful that i checked out when the words 'millions and millions' of users will one day use steem.
I tried to go back and watch some more of it in case there was something worth hearing coming from the mouth of our hero playing his guitar, but just couldnt do it.

If you take the time to look, i have a 5 digit account number.
When i got here there were 1200 daily authors.
I have a pretty good idea of how the math works.
My seat of the pants estimates generally land in the ballpark.

At the time linear rewards were forced upon us by fiat, the community had made its response to the abuse of the n2 by the greedy whales.
Abit and smooth had put the kibosh on their sucking up all the rewards.
Those two downvoted any votes using more than 800mv.
The result of this whale experiment was great excitement among the minnows at their votes actually registering on the ui.
Those were ~10 good days.

The affected whales werent too happy, but they got with the program, for the most part.
Steem doesnt make sense as a game if the top 100 accounts are the only accounts earning from the reward pool, and they know that.

Those few whales with insatiable greed, and overbearing personalities, cried like little bitches and threatened to pull their investments.
Our weak willed leader gave in to their threats and forced linear rewards on us.
Rather than face the fact that distribution does matter, and mitigate its ill effects, those accounts were allowed to run roughshod over the pool and their greed was lost in the minnows getting their votes multiplied by 4x so that they too registered on the ui.

Linear rewards resulted in making spam profitable.
Self voting got them 100% of multiple hundred stu votes.
10 times a day, every day. It still does.
The black hat coders were quick to get on their bots and ride.
They are still in their saddles riding this community for maximum benefit for them.
Damn the consequences! Profits are to be made!
ROI rules over any other consideration!

As a community we were too young to know at the time how devastating this change would be, after all our votes did become visible.
We didnt know how small the daily reward pool payout actually is.

Well, now we know.
Not only has linear rewards made this game attractive to only the few greedy whales, their sycophants, and folks not too good at math, but those folks that are good at math stopped investing.

Not only has this been the results on steem, but the same greedy whales tanked golos.io, too.
Golos is a russian fork of steem.
Everybody that had an account on steem in Oct '16 got an account on golos.

It isnt like our hero doesnt know the truth of the situation, he just doesnt care.
He has his, he could burn this to the ground and it wouldnt impact his life in any substantial way.
He is not counting on steem for his supper.

If we want steem to succede the community is going to have to rise up and take control back from the greedy f**ks.
They like things this way, or things wouldnt be this way.

They crashed golos, and laughed.
They still get enough suckers to buy into steem's potential, but have no plans of allowing steem to moon.

For steem to reach its promised goal of abundance for all, we will have to change the hearts and minds of the greedy f**ks that took us off that path.

Thanks alot, greedy f**ks, we could be a successful blogging platform that introduces the masses to crypto, but instead you force us to play the fool to feed your fat faces.

Source of base image
Meme by FBA!