Steem is not a newspaper its a blog.
If you're paying anyone to blog you're being ripped off.
If you have to 'put in' anything to get your blog hosted on steem it would immediately lose its credibility as a blogging platform.
Every cent that steem is worth, comes from people posting, the witnesses arent providing the bloggers with a service, they're harvesting the value from bloggers posts, and getting rewarded for it based on bloggers witness votes.
Can you imagine facebook limiting people from commenting, posting etc?
I'm not really arguing I'm just adding to the discourse I get your point of course, but I think that things have changed, social services HAVE to be free and they HAVE to pay the content creator, we all know this is the future.
Can you imagine if a newspaper charged their reporters for the articles? or the correspondance writers for their letters? that would be considered crazy.
I'm not really disagreeing, I'm agreeing, I just hope that those who hold the reins can be trusted to not adjust the parameter in their own favor and to rather adjust it in the bloggers favor, do you think that is a realistic thing to expect when bloggers have no control and only witnesses do?
See the problem is subtle, and is only likely to expose itself down the line when people get hindered by greedy witnesses choking the chain for more moola.
Anyway time will tell if their hearts are pure enough to ignore profit ;)
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.