RE: For the First Time, I Might Be Losing Faith in Steem...
It's literally impossible to make a full-time living on Steem right now.
I'm one of the most generously rewarded people on here, and will maybe earn the equivalent of $200-300 USD per month. Impossible to survive on.
And even if I did make the leap to post exclusively full-time on Steem, there's absolutely nothing preventing one or two whales from downvoting my content like they have been over the past week, on three occasions.
And this is the problem with down voting for "overrewarding" too. It makes it impossible for people to earn enough on Steem to post exclusively.
If I can earn $60 on a YouTube video, why would I post exclusively on Steem when (especially after downvotes) I might only make $5 on a video? Rational people won't do that.
So you're preventing people from going full time on Steem. If you want a platform full of hobbyists, that's fine. Or only people who are so rich that they don't need financial compensation, that's fine too.
But Steem won't attract professional content creators with this overrewarding downvoting nonsense.
The entire idea of making a living by being a content creator on Steem at the moment is something anyone living in a first world country should not even consider. What we have is a platform very much a work in progress. The value of the token is speculative as it is based on future expectations of what can be accomplished if everything pans out. It would be completely foolhardy to even consider that at this stage.
What Steem needs is the necessary features for mass onboarding before any content creator can realistically consider this a place to earn a steady income.
Rather than some downvotes I'd worry about the token price plummeting if I were a content creator trying to make a living off Steem.
@markkujantunen pretty much nailed it. The priority right now isn't meaningfully paying a broad swath of content creators for content alone. That is an impossible and unaffordable luxury given Steem's precarious position. It is trying to maximize impact with what little budget we have now (in the manner I described above), and slow or ideally reverse the plummeting token price.
Until then, please consider prioritizing what you can do to help increase the value of your Steem investment, and not treating Steem like an ATM for the tiny pittance it can add to your youtube, etc. earnings, downvotes or no downvotes.