@smooth I know you know all of this, although you might quibble with some of my predictions.
As I predicted in 2016, the Steem rewards (from voting, although witness rewards are also) are “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” for any design that can be conceived that mints the rewards from collectively “owned” (i.e. collectivized) money supply because this is a Prisoner’s dilemma (thus everyone must defect) as the Steem white paper admits on page 14.
The proposed negative voting disincentive to prevent defection is also a Prisoner’s dilemma (as Vitalik explained that altruism prime is an undersupplied public good) because it only makes economic sense if all of the super majority of the voting power flags (i.e. negative votes) all the defectors (which is why @berniesanders is losing his war). Which even if achieved would be deleterious because it ties everyone’s shoelaces together and reduces degrees-of-freedom necessary for diverse use and adoption. And @vandeberg admitted herein that it’s sufficiently easy to hide defection from the majority even if they would coordinate their negative voting (which they won’t anyway). Even if we develop scripts to try to ferret out all the sock puppets, we still have the difficulty of publicizing this flag list to the majority and getting them all coordinated. And if we can coordinate them all monolithically then Steem has become “we think as one brain”.
My perspective as an observer is that the move to linear voting was a desperation move to placate the majority for an interim time while piling on new developments such as Steam Media Tokens, Dtube, Dlive, Utopian, Busy, etc.. But none of those are going to correct the underlying problem of why Steem isn’t scaling adoption. More and more users are discovering that they should use their voting power to earn more rewards in the most efficient way possible. Thus Steem is dying as a platform where voting, rankings, and followers mean anything. Thus Steem is dying. One stiff wind (i.e. a strong competitor with a fixed reward and onboarding system) will blow it over.
I don't really even quibble with most of it, except maybe the dying part, but mostly because I don't really think it was ever a platform where voting ranking or followers meant much. If it never was that, how could it die as that?
It's always been a small niche user base and a likely quite a bit larger (and perhaps unappreciated) audience of read-only viewers who never even sign up or sign-in, much less vote or participate in any of this 'rewarding' stuff. To some people just having a functional platform, probably less censored in practice than a lot of the commercial ones (even if censorship resistance in theory is a bit oversold), where you can occasionally make a little money is good enough. But its still a niche platform, with an atrociously underdeveloped feature set (especially after two years live), nothing more.