Your thoughts and suggestions are very interesting William, and I join you on some of them (like "Fix the trending algorithm" or "Hide how much people are earning in order to stop resentment", yes our generation may not be ready for full transparency) Neverthless, I would advice to better organise your thoughts, it is not always easy to follow you through ;-)
Also I'm sure than the core team are well aware of human behavior and motivation. This project built around 3 tokens testifies it.
There is full transparency on the blockchain. But if putting $ amounts in peoples faces is causing bad feelings then it might be better for the community to not make it so obviously apparent.
The dilemma of our generation is to choose between full transparency and respect for privacy.
There's a difference between transparency and show boating though. If someone wants to know a person's finances then take a dip in the blockchain. It's not hard, I ain't got much but here's mine https://www.steemd.com/@williambanks .
But if what you were saying were to happen in the real world we'd all be running around with our tax returns and paychecks stubs stapled to our foreheads. #needstobememe #sadbuttrue
I do understand what you're saying though. I wish the blockchain could be a bit more private, the IRS is going to have a field day with me next year. Thanks to this posting I've officially earned "reportable income" from this place. There's not a loophole for that so here's hoping we can attract some heavy hitters to this platform so they can at least apply some pressure to make social earnings a tax exempt activity.
The amount will always be available, and an alternate UI platform or modification/script/browser-addin may decide to display it for people who want to see it, but as a design choice, showing it by default is one thing that keeps me from using steemit as a "serious" communication platform.
If I direct people from my personal or business life to a post on steemit, the "dollar" figure on the post and each of the comments will be very distracting from the message of the post and hard to explain.
"Man you can't just let people know how much you have, where you live and who your kids and family are. Are you nuts! Just make it so everyone is poor and it just looks like every once in a while someone strikes it big. Otherwise there are going to be people robbing or worse IRL."@tie-warutho Yeah and real comment from someone I tried to bring to steemit today...
Thanks for the feedback @jako. This was originally posted as a response in Dan's blog and then I realized that was a mistake so I brought it here and tried to edit it a bit. However it's 3AM when I started editing, it's 5AM now and I think I need to sleep before trying a final cleanup pass, especially now if it seems to be hard to follow.
As for motivations, I do think they are losing site of it. The incoming changes don't have an explanation except to address the symptom rather than the cause. If I didn't believe that then I wouldn't say it. Anytime you start talking about punishment, it means you are losing sight of the human factors and need to step back for a moment. So let's say this is a reminder.