You said that these protocol changes have stripped away spam protection, spam to me is also a symptom not the disease.

Of course. That was my entire point. The spam, the vote-selling, the shit content being “advertised,” the disengagement, the lack of accountability...this all became a bigger issue after the protocols were changed. They are all symptoms/consequences of last year’s hard forks.

I could explain in detail why/how the hard forks created these problems...which I’ve done many times over since last summer, including before they were implemented. And back then - just like now - nobody listened. But just for good measure, I suppose I’ll detail this again in a separate post. Too long to cover all of the various aspects of it here.

I'm surprised that all existing steem apps display the steem content in the same way which has proved to be one of the worst discoverability experience for users.

Are you really surprised by this though? Most of our “developers” here are hobbyists or first-timers developing in the social media space. They unfortunately don’t know the fundamentals of social media and user interests...and the users here aren’t typical SM users/content creators either, so both sides skew the metrics. Then we have the actual results of the voting/allocation and displays skewing it even further.

I could be wrong but in its current form I don't see it being used on a large scale by serious advertisers.

There isn’t even enough of a critical mass of users for real-world advertisers to even consider spending advertising dollars here. Anyone looking at the actual viewing and engagement stats - even for “trending” posts - would quickly look elsewhere to spend their money.

But even if we assume that advertising here actually gained visibility and returned some profit for businesses, it would be more beneficial to them to buy the STEEM once and use it repeatedly for self-voting or self-promotion, not rent space on the trending page for every post they make.

This is the mistake that current users continue to make as well. They pay for temporary advertisement and have nothing to show for it when the advertising period is over. So they’re stuck in this perpetual loop of paying for visibility over and over again when they could simply buy the STEEM outright and get perpetual use out of it.

But this happens in the real world all the time as well. People often rent for the wrong reasons and think that they’re coming out on top financially, but they truly believe that there’s no other way. They continue to do what keeps them poor...so they remain poor, even if it’s just relative to those who are “richer.”

And we have a ton of admittedly real-world poor people here on Steem/Steemit. Does anyone truly wonder why things are the way they are around here?