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I think we're losing development because the whales have damaging ideologies that are killing the platform. Look at the reasons Dtube gave for breaking off from Steem and building their own blockchain. One of the two main reasons they gave was the punishment system for sharing information.

This place is called Steem"it" because it is meant to resemble Reddit. Do people write blog articles on Reddit? No, they share blog articles they wrote or someone wrote elsewhere. But here, on Steem, that's called abuse. That is a very foolish policy and its going to keep Steem small. DTube is lost because of this thinking, and that was an important loss. If you ask me, Dtube was more valuable to the future of Steem than Steemit Inc.

If projects keep finding it easier to fork Steem than do business on it we'll have a much bigger problem than the loss of Steemit Inc. development.

The other reason was the terrible on-boarding experience. Accounts need to be free and take seconds to create and not weeks. In my opinion, upvoting should not cost resource credits, however, posting and commenting should cost resource credits.