I don't see how or why the platform and its users would always correct the situation to an equilibrium between low-effort and quality content though. That's a little too idealistic for me to be able to accept.
If someone is milking the reward pool with little to no effort, but not a significant enough number of people, then that behaviour may be able to be absorbed amongst everything else without an overall negative impact on the platform as a whole.
But, in my humble opinion, there's only so many "how to make more money with Steemit" posts, or whining by long-serving content writers who haven't bothered to submit anything substantive for awhile, yet still expect the exact same payouts, before people would wise up and find an alternative.
Have you see how sometimes lions might hunt gazelles way too much? What happens is that lions begin to die due to lack of food. They make less offspring and this the gazelles have time to grow their numbers. Something similar happens in all ecosystems.
then the incident might be insignificant and non-systemic
it happened before. people do back off if they notice. people who enjoyed large rewards, ended up powering down and vanishing.
The failure of the analogy with lions and gazelles is that lions have no opportunities when gazelles are gone. The @whales do. Short term profit should not be a novel concept. It drives the corporate world.
There is potential, in Steemit, to not only kill Steemit for profit, but to 'poison the well' in a world where significant propaganda, surveillance, and repression of speech is ongoing, and perhaps increasing to an intolerable level.
I hope these considerations are undertaken soon, in order to preclude such things from affecting Steemit undesirably.
The whales don't really have alternatives when the resources run out whether we speak about normal folk or gazelles. They ecosystem collapses. Remember ENRON? Leehman Brothers?
I haven't seen repression of speech here and the only surveillance is in regards to copyrighted material.
You could make suggestions in a post if you feel that there are such occurrences.
"it happened before. people do back off if they notice. people who enjoyed large rewards, ended up powering down and vanishing"
In my completely uninformed opinion, based on less than a week's worth of steeming, I had already become convinced that I would see this exact scenario play out later this summer. But that's inevitably part of the cycle, I guess.
Still, it's all good as far as I'm concerned. All things considered, I've found a lot more interesting stuff here than elsewhere, so even if the payment aspect is solely what's fueling that, I'm not gonna knock it.
I paid nothing, and got a higher rate of interest (literally and figuratively) on that investment of time than I would have on Facebook, for example.
Especially when it comes to the "secrets of the blockchain" the sheer value this platform provides is unfathomable.
Yeap. the only thing no one can beat :)