I do not feel that rewards are the most important thing to look at when it comes to retention. Many of the people who had the rewards quit and many of the people who didn’t have rewards stuck around and eventually made things work for themselves, some have stuck around despite never making much.
Rewards are just one aspect of retention. Feeling like your voice is being heard Can be just as much of a motivator. Most of the people I know who left (and I know tons of them) did so cause they felt the witnesses and dolphins weren’t listening to them and they hated bidbots. Before this acquisition I had a feeling many of them would come back and in fact many did.
As for retiring off my current stack, sure I’d like that but that’s not a guarantee no matter what we do and I agree with you retention is the way to do it, but I think giving more power to the community is the real way to do so. There will need to be some mechanisms put in place to control reward place abuse. I hope it will be the community that comes up with it and Justin just helping us to do so smoothly.
I don’t care what chain we are on.
I don’t have many preferences about how he decides to decentralize power. I only care that he makes attempts to decentralize it, otherwise Facebook or someone else is going to come along and do the same thing and do it better. We need something that can’t be replicated.
I agree broadly with what you're saying. @jarvie has just posted regarding this exact issue, that it is the independence we are able to have from censors on centralized platforms, and the coming communities we can build to improve our growth in the directions we want to go, that are the really important values people have that Steem can provide.
While the few cents we make aren't important, as you point out, the bidbots and profiteering really rankles. Even dogs care a lot about fairness, which may seem counterintuitive. Dogs will literally fight to the death over scraps even when well fed, if those scraps are distributed unfairly. For dogs, food establishes dominance and their social value, and rewards are sort of similar for people.
I need a censorship resistant platform to speak my mind on, or I'll get censored. I'm censored everywhere else. I'm a decentralization booster, because I think it's the basis for freedom. I have concerns that the CCP is somehow linked to Tron, and I don't think either free speech or decentralization will long be permitted on a platform the CCP controls.
I’ve already been self censored on this issue :-P
Probably wise.
Yep and if you get people to come here for other reasons we know we can control and that will always be a part of the Steem experience then they'll always have a reason to be here. If it's reward money then retention is based on something we kind of can't control because it's more speculators or the price of bitcoin which we can't control either... Don't put your dependency on things you can't control.