But recently I became self employed and I have a lot of debt. I'm using some of the money Ive been making to go on a small vacation and to pay off my debt. Once that is done, I intend to start powering up more.
It is very wise to pay off all debt before investing in a speculative blockchain project, especially one that locks up your money for 1 year average holding period.
I should make some disclosures so that you will be able to weigh my opinion with an understanding of my biases. If you had followed my links to Bitcointalk.org discussion, and had read many of iamnotback's (my) posts there, you would come to realize that I am intending to create a competitor to Steem, that will have some significant differences.
The problem I see with Steem's voting paradigm is that it motivates producing content which appeals site-wide, instead of to a coterie of like-minded followers. But site-wide focused content is a groupthink, meaning I think Steem will struggle to be relevant to wider diversity of audiences.
Also blogging is not something most people can do well, so why will millions of others join if the only they can read of the "we are change" (self-help, libertarian principles, anarchy proponents, why steemians are awesome, etc) groupthink blogs. The stats show that 93% of signups don't even earn $10 on Steem(it), so why would they bother to stay here. On Medium there are 20,000 people who blog weekly, and 25 million unique monthly blog readers. On Steem(it), we appear to have about 1500 serious bloggers active in the past week who've earned at least $100s. I doubt that Steemit has 2 million unique monthly readers (which is another reason to think Steemit's Alexa rank is not correct or manipulated as it
estimates 6.5 million monthly readers).
But more importantly, I don't see why those serious Medium bloggers would switch to Steem(it), when they can't earn anything because their content doesn't appeal to the "we are change" mindset of the Steem groupthink.And without growth, the monetary system of Steem will implode as it would then just be all of us extracting from the collective debasement of the money supply without any widespread viral growth to show for it, that would drive investment.
I have what I think is a better design, which solves these dilemmas. I think voting is a dysfunctional paradigm for numerous reasons. We shouldn't even be bothered with trying to discern what a vote should mean, as for example how you used downvoting as a weapon against @nameles who you felt was bad for the site. I understand the frustration with trolls and also the desire to protect the site, but that ends up as a war of attrition and no one wins if we all bind ourselves together in one groupthink and fight over who has control. Instead the solution is decentralization of groupings, so our like-minded groupings have localized control, not site-wide.
Also I think the Steem(it) name sucks. It doesn't speak to what a site like this really does and should be about, in terms of being a store of content for content producers.
I am not powering up because I must lock up my investment for 2 years (1 year weighted average price to power down). And in crypto s/w world, everything can change in a one month. The design I am contemplating, won't force anyone to power up in order to invest. Steem's design dilutes (liquid not powered up) STEEM at 50% yearly, thus it is not very attractive for medium-term speculation.
There are numerous flaws I see in Steem, although I think it has been an important experiment and I congratulate the creators on their initial success.
As in all things, best to diversify to hedge our bets. I continue to support Steem(it) and want to see where it can go, while I am also working on a competing design, so we all have options. Competition is what drives improvement.
Edit: my key point is that the groupthink of voting will discourage diversification of content and readership and thus limit Steem's upside adoption. So far, the metrics seem to support my view that Steem is topping out in a crypto-libertarian-nerd-hippie groupthink.