The witnesses are like senators in the US - mainly decided by monied interests, not the masses.
The witnesses are representatives that achieve their positions via stake based voting. Because of that governance we are able to have the fastest, free transaction fee, scalable blockchain that exist to my knowledge - without the hashing power required by Proof of Work blockchains.
Those witnesses receive stake based votes. Even in the White Paper STEEM's design was stake based. One can wish it to be different, but it never has and (unless one is willing to put a lot of stake forward to enforce that change) it never will be other than stake based.
If someone has led you to believe that it ever was an egalitarian democracy they have done you a mis-service.
STEEM is quickly moving away from the one trick pony that it had been from the time of my account creation. The power of that fast, free and scalable blockchain is rising and Condenser is quickly becoming just another dApp on The Chain. A wonderful and unique dApp to be sure. A dApp that allowed us to put personalities on hash addresses.
My feeling is that STEEM was never meant to replace Facebook. My feeling is that Delegated Proof of Work was an experiment to see if scalability could be achieved.
It has been achieved.
We are likely going to see the blockchain explode in ways we cannot yet imagine after the next HF. We will have users that don't even know they are using the STEEM blockchain. They will deal in tokens while not even realising that those tokens float on top of the foundation of STEEM. It may be hard to believe that this experiment is only a little over three years old the way we look nostalgically back at that short evolution; but STEEM has only yet begun in my opinion.
Because the whole premise of STEEM mining being based on Proof of Brain, it seems critical to me that all forms of automated counterfeit STEEM mining be penalised, so as to reduce the counterfeiting. A bot is a bot is a bot which devalues STEEM through counterfeiting in my opinion.
OK, again, you're allowed to disagree with me and love it Because Technology or whatever, but that doesn't mean that I don't think it has problems and would like to see it improved. It has always been stake based voting, but I think that sucks. You can think it's lovely. People have always been unfair here, and I think that sucks. You can think it's lovely. Your opinion is your opinion and mine is mine. I am way more concerned with people escaping poverty than any other aspect. I've always known that this space was very heavy with ancaps, but I am not one and so my values and priorities are different. The tech is the means that I was hoping to be used for the ends of lifting people out of poverty. If those ends aren't met, then people using the tech to play games and not realize they're using it means very little to me.
You're allowed to think the system is great; I'm allowed to think that it's not. You can think that the community on the blogging end is irrelevant in the long run, I disagree. You can think the blogging end was all an experiment and "one trick pony" and so doesn't matter, but I think the community came and showed their dedication and then were given the shaft in repayment for their hard work.
I'll hang around to support the people I care about and the causes I care about, but from my view, things are a lot worse than they were, and a lot of our community has left our little village, and I think that's sad. If Steem wasn't serious about the "social media" aspect, then they shouldn't have touted it as such. If it was only for the techies and no one else was welcome, then "onboarding the masses" should never have been attempted. It should have been billed as "an experimental forum for blockchain enthusiasts."
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Steemit had been flying a Beta warning on their opening page for about three years. Only recently has it come down. Does that tell you anything?
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It's irrelevant to my point. Again, you can think it's great. I don't.
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The fact that the project was deemed to be in Beta until fairly recently by the main developers of the project is very relevant in my opinion. But let's save that thought for a happier day. 😎
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It's relevant to your point, but not to mine: alleviating poverty and community.
We're not going to agree on the point of Steem and it's potential though, so yeah, let's leave it.
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