Well, I think it does have to be a huge debate on how much is a normal amount that new accounts will be fine with. I used 5 as a restrictive example. The main thing is that we need to figure out something that's usable, even if they have to work a bit to get themselves above that. Kinda like a game.
If we give them too many though, then we have to decrease the speed that the number of posts increases by or it will just allow abuse.
But, if we restrict the number of posts on the tinniest of minnows, they'll wait to post the most important of comments and posts, and work to grow.
But it is very important that everyone debates this, to get the exact number right.
It's not really censorship. If you don't pay for someone else to publish an article in your newspaper, it's not censorship. The fact is that it costs money to run sites. It costs quite a bit of money. The current blockchain incarnation is already fucking huge. Every witness server might be big enough to run this site by itself if it weren't on a blockchain. We can't have people abusing the system and making it harder to run the site. The question is how much are we going to supplement newbs, so they can earn enough to support themselves on here.
If the rates that are implemented are too restrictive, we can establish groups to find people to target for delegations. It's not that huge of an issue.
But it certainly feels like a huge issue when you're a new user and you're told that you haven't invested enough to comment any more times per day.
Of course, if they put in as much as they pay for their cell phone, they could probably get on fine. But we aren't quite that good for most yet.
Everyone pays for hosting. How they do it is the difference. On some sites you pay for it with your eyes on advertisers. On some you pay with your data...and eyes on advertisements, because that's practically free money. Here, you pay with investment and in turn get paid. They probably could just cover everyone with the investments of the larger accounts, but they decided that there were certain accounts abusing the system. To deal with that, they decided to put in this system. Now the question is how much to limit small accounts, because the system as it was originally implemented was thought to be too strict.
As to the value of Steem...it's actually a split. There are certainly a lot of bloggers here that bring value...as well as some that are just leeches, but the actual value of Steem is caused by investors and traders, evaluating a number of factors, including the platform.
They've basically just turned it into a game where you have to level up first to be able to use it constantly. I have faith that many that we want to stay will deal with the limits for long enough that they can grow their account a bit. There will also be groups that pop up to increase people's delegations that appear to be really good users.