It's a conversation we need to have. If I didn't **already care** about steemit, and I saw the first few posts.... Let's just say I wouldn't be back. Self-referential humor is cool, and it builds community... Excitement is understandable.. But what do we have to offer?

Accounts are seeded with what... 3 SP now? That has absolutely no voting power and no reward for voting. It's technically almost $10 on a market nobody can access.... To a lot of people, that's going to seem deceptive.

The way content is promoted by a relatively small number of users who happen to have been able to amass a lot of tokens when they were cheap is a real problem that we have to overcome. It's fairly arbitrary, and their interests are necessarily narrow, due to their financial incentives and their emotional investment.

Ultimately we need to find a way to actualize the democratizing potential of the platform. That means beginning to flatten the distribution of rewards and allow for a diverse range of content to flourish.

It's cool that @berniesanders can touch a comment and give somebody $800 bucks. But it's also a joke, right? On a bunch of different levels... But perhaps  most importantly, it's distorting the market. If the incentives are designed in such a way as to promote the best content, then it should be left up to the users of the site to decide what that is. Arbitrary preferences of individuals shouldn't hold that much more sway than a thousand new users who find their contributions to be insignificant and unappreciated.

Since joining the community, I've tried to tell people that we need to offer something more than a quick buck. If the only thing we offer is the ability to make some money, we might as well pack it up and go home. The money is nice right now, but it's not going to last if the only people we draw in are here for their piece of the pie.

This probably won't be popular with the whales, but they are not that important and their judgement is not distinctly better than the rest of the user base. It's arbitrary and distorting to have content rewarded the way it is now, and it should be re-evaluated as soon as possible.