RE: Parasitic Profiteering vs. Capital Gains and Content Creation
It is very challenging to properly value money, particularly given the imposition of propaganda via the enemedia. We all need to use money, but we are incessantly bombarded with the message that we must have MORE! There can never be enough money in our bank account, our wallet, or under the mattress.
This isn't really true at all. There isn't any other resource people require; air, water, food, sex, etc.., that has no upwards limit of utility. Just like crack, when you have enough money, you really have too much.
The recent removal of Gab from the internet, while it has been restored, illustrates just how important decentralized blockchain social media is. Our ability to gain factual information, to share and discuss it, and consider how to act on it depends on independent platforms, and I know of no other mechanism to resist deplatforming than decentralization.
It is for this reason that I consider the doubling of curation rewards to be an existential threat to not only Steem, because it would allow financial predators like Goldman Sachs to capture and control the rewards pool, enabling them to control the content on Steem based platforms, but to freedom itself. Without the ability to abandon bankster controlled platforms like Twatter, Fakebook, and Youtool, and post on Steemit, the censorship and purge of the internet would be inescapable, and then prosecuted in earnest.
@tlavagabond reports that another journalist has been tortured to death by KSA, yet of this new atrocity and active censorship of real news, the enemedia do not even whisper.[Edit: apparently, his identity was revealed by the Dubai offices of Twatter, IIRC, and he was murdered for his posts on Twatter revealing criminal corruption of the government. Anyone who thinks anonymous posting is bad should reflect on this and reconsider.]
If the Steem rewards system is able to be used to censor we independent journalists, there will be no way for us to learn the truth about anything. All we will be able to hear is what bankster controlled platforms allow us.
While it is important for Steem based social media platforms to support plankton - who essentially are unable to gain any curation rewards at all - and this is a reason why doubling curation rewards is bad, it is actually a far more important issue that doing so would enable the capture of the rewards pool by legacy financial entities, such as the Vampire Squid, Goldman Sachs.
None of the problems discussed here are applicable to real-life scenarios, adding more value to in-person conversation and information sharing. Realistically, the real work is on the ground in our communities anyway. Media has become a sub-matrix many people are way too caught up in.
The steem platform is great in theory and I also agree that platforms such as this are a step in the right direction. As usual it is up to the user to direct the development through what we do and do not support. Are we willing to pull the plug if the time comes that steem becomes too polluted?
I would love to see the financial rewards simply become influence tokens of sort. You sure are right about plankton and the reward pool.
Making it so that you could not purchase and add steem would also help.