It's a conundrum that promotional efforts on Steemit are causing users to leave. While such promotional efforts aren't exerted outside Steemit, so can't be used to attract users to the platform, at least until SMT's come online, the reality is that votebots, which folks use to improve their rewards, are causing rewards to be concentrated more, rather than less.

@bitopia has posted a great idea to improve the promotions feature of Steemit, which could replace votebots - but not the income bots produce for substantial stakeholders.

As many investments require patience, it may be that stakeholders in Steem need to forego immediate profits in order to generate capital gains.

I think this is pretty obvious, from the data. It is difficult to say when it's your ducats on the line, but cognitive dissonance has never improved an investor's ability to profit. Either user retention improves dramatically, which requires several orders of magnitude of improvement in distribution, which requires whales' dilution of their stakes, or the consequences will be diminution of those stakes, in terms of value relative to other currency.

Were you to ask me would I rather have $100 which was enough to buy an ice cream cone, or $1 which could buy two, I'd take the dollar. The problem isn't academic for substantial stakeholders here, and either the 38 yachts that need the fleet of leaky skiffs to bring them content begin to fix those skiffs, or they will quit getting content from the skiffs that sink or are abandoned (my rising tide floats all boats analogy).

Thanks!