So who is actually paying the Steemit bill?

(Source: http://www.entrypoint.cz/)

When I started here in early July, I was pretty sceptic. I had not known very much about Dan or BitShares, but the BitUSD pegging mechanism seemed unfeasible to me when I looked into it at the time, so I was negatively biased when I saw he is behind Steemit. In my view, you can't peg something with a market price of its own (USD) to something that has no real use besides pretending to "back" a peg and the "other uses" for BitShares seemed insufficient to me to give them enough value to sustainably back the USD peg (I still consider BitUSD to be a failure, though I've heard claims to the contrary, but that's nothing I care about and as for Dan, I'm a big fan now, after having read his contributions here).

Plus, I am invested in Synereo since ICO and was expecting them to be the first blockchain-based social media project to go live. That turned out to be helpful, because I am convinced, that the concept of "attention economy" I knew through them can be executed in a profitable way. So when I thought that Steemit was going that path, I eventually turned from sceptic to optimist. I actually turned to a full blown Steemit enthusiast, but not for financial reasons, but because I simply love to be able to get crypto-noobs interested in crypto and offer them a risk free way to get some first crypto-experiences. I also love Steemit, because it is no direct competitor to Bitcoin and is thus very inclusive, unlike other projects that "attack" Bitcoin or any other competing Altcoin.

Experienced crypto investors like myself would take the risk and profit later, when Steemit would have reached enough users to attract advertisers to pay for the attention they need. I knew it would not be easy, because (liquid) Steem is highly inflationary and I consider it more of an industrial commodity like copper and not a precious metal/monetary asset like gold or bitcoin. So you really have to need Steem Power to want to buy some Steem, because I was not willing to speculate that many people would just buy Steem to power it up to be able to reward others, as I did it for the tiny german speaking community. But I guessed that people who are used to pay for other peoples' attention (e.g. advertisers) would step up sooner or later and they would not care that Steem is copper and not gold, because they need it for their business. 

Fast forward to today. In the past weeks, I had tons of discussions and I grew sceptic again, because in my impression, Steemit so far does not really seem to care about investors. It's all about content creators and about the "fair" distribution of rewards and whether whales are to blame for "dumping" or having "too much power". I could not care less whether whales dump or not, it's the lack of incentives to buy that has me worried, because to be honest, as an investor it started to feel like being the guy who pays the party and I was not really able to find many people willing to listen to my concerns. On the contrary, I had people with no real skin in the game telling me I was a nay-sayer and overly pessimistic or that I did not see how "investors" would come on their own, as soon as such and such amount of users where to be here and I was blind for not seeing that Steemit was the next Facebook. I also talked to a lot of people, who are extremely optimistic about Steemit, but oddly not enough to actually invest and they tended to not like it when I pointed them to that contradiction.

I also read what I could find and listened to Ned and Dan (most recently on the Tatiana Show), but I still don't feel that the problem I see is being addressed. For instance, the promotion field to me is a failure, because again, we seem to care more about people who want everything for free. Free from any financial risks AND free from adverts, so promoted posts are now in that little box noboby seems to watch, but at least the profane promotions are separated from the "valuable" content posts. 

So I even headed back to Bitcointalk, a platform I had been so glad to leave because of its toxicity, to get some answers. You can say what you want about BCTalk, but at least it is not only happy talk there.

That's the result so far (I am Macno):

I actually really want this to succeed, so I hope someone is going to prove my scepticism wrong.

Maybe I am missing something or I am too impatient?

PS:

I propose the tag #investorsunite because we are important too :-)