I have read, and mostly failed to understand, at least six suggestions on how to improve the value of Steem in just the last three days.

These suggestions, as far as I can see, involve manipulating the game behind steem so as to change (variously: increase or decrease) participant's likelihood of earning or holding different phases of the currency. 

But, unless I am completely wrong (and seriously, please be sure to educate me if I am) there's really only one thing I personally can do, everything else is out of my hands. 

I can improve the original work that the currency is based upon - The posting and voting of only the highest value original content, finding community oriented individuals and habitually upvoting their content, resisting the urge to vote on silly things that will probably get a disproportionately large return.

Writing content for Steemit is the most efficient form of mining most people can do. Apparently. I have read of people setting up thousands of dollars worth of computers to mine a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoins, I imagine actual mining of Steem is not much different. In fact, I read a post about a guy who (IIUC) was happy to get 0.75 Steem a day on a dedicated computer.  Here again, please feel free to correct me on this. I would be happy to be wrong, I have an extra linux machine just gathering dust.

But what I see happening - again, admittedly from a newbie point of view - is people upvoting content that will return them the most Steem, instead of upvoting content that will increase the value of Steem. That just seems counterproductive at this stage.

Now maybe I'm wrong, maybe their method will make Steem more desirable by its rarity. But my thought is that a rare piece of junk is not really worth as much as a common but high quality tool. If other people see that thoughtful, documented articles, high quality art and literature, detailed instructional posts, and stimulating conversations are the underpinning of the currency, then they will be more likely to invest than if they see metaphorical cat video reposts as the gold standard.

This post is 100% powerup because I really just want discussion. I am not Declining Payout because if someone agrees with me, then they probably also want me to have  little bit more influence with my vote. My goal is to help create a distributed community with a real social/economic system that sidesteps the entrenched powers.


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