Look at the bright side. The SBD market is working again! When the price dipped below $0.9 a bunch of buyers swooped in and pumped it right back up to $1.0.

In some ways, it is more important to me that the system functions correctly. The price of STEEM will take care of itself if the system is useful. The "system" has a lot of moving parts, though, and none of them can be neglected. Maintaining the SBD peg, fast page loads, reliable transactions, all that technical stuff needs to be dialed in.

The social network is also part of the "system" though. We often worry about people dropping out because they don't earn enough, which is silly. There might be people who do that, but they were not going to make very good friends anyway.

I'll bet the number one reason why people drop out is because of disappointing social interactions. Every post that scrolls off the page with no comments is like a birthday party where nobody showed up.

I wish the payout was only displayed after 7 days so that people would focus more on voting and commenting. It would also help if the payouts were reported in vests so that it was more abstract. All the focus on dollar values of posts is an effort to convince the outside world that Steemit is worth something. Rather than doing that, we should work on creating something that Steemit users value for its own sake.

Everything else will take care of itself.