Here's a related bit from @smooth:

i believe that the prospects of success of the blockchain rests heavily on more experiments by the community and different developers in form of different use cases and user interfaces and not just steemit.com and its own set of experiments, however important rapid or comprehensive those experiments may be.

now not all experiments are equal. introducing economic rules which strongly impede and disadvantage these forms of broad experimentation are harmful, arguably an existential threat. it is very possible for steemit do its work and rapidly iterate on combination of some UX and blockchain factors which do not have these harmful side effects and will still produce useful results (positive and negative), may very well lead to improved retention, etc. look at the usage metrics since the whale non-voting (which changed slope significantly before the price rise and continued through it) and consider that it bears a lot in common with linearity and has little (nothing) to do with segmented comment pool for example.

imo this is witnesses doing our job and safeguarding the blockchain as a neutral and promising medium for all users and reasonably-viable usages and not just steemit.com

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