I agree, Steemit could use more critical voices. I was originally on Minds exclusively before coming here, and since then I have noticed two major differences between Minds and Steemit.
First is rewards. I get quite a bit more monetary rewards on Steemit. I think part of that is the curation community in general, as they are very active on Steemit while Minds still doesn't have much of that.
But the second is more worrying. Criticism. I get criticism on comments and blog posts alike on Minds. Steemit, I almost never see criticism of any kind on my posts beyond mention of typos, though I personally will voice my honest opinion on just about anyone's post. It does seem there is indeed a high tendency of people to blindly support anything they see here, because they want people to support them.
I think this is tied to the first thing; rewards. Steemit has a dollar amount associated with every post. Users don't want to lose what they have, and they want to increase what they can get. The most straight forward way of doing this is positive feedback while avoiding rocking the boat. Many people ignore the ideas being discussed and just see the dollar signs. They see someone earning hundreds, and assume they must have higher value content as well as connections, thus encouraging them to support that person blindly.
After the fork, which:
- I wasn't even aware of before it started. I don't know if there was a coordinated campaign to alert users, but if so I do not recall seeing it.
- prevented me from posting for a full two days(frustrating when I had a schedule of posts for the week, a practice I had been doing for over a month)
- not only prevented, but deleted my scheduled posts on SteemPeak(Luckily, I'm the kind of guy to back things up locally)
- did not give me an explanation as to what was going on or what "resource credits" even were(this should have been in an info box on my profile somewhere, but I only even saw an actual metric using SteemPeak and no explanation of how much I needed to post. I had 15%, but still couldn't post. Basic information on using Steemit should not require tracking down posts on Steemit.)
...and this article highlighting why this happened, I'm deeply concerned about the viability of Steemit. This is not the first major technical issue, and it's unlikely to be the last. It seems there are systemic problems in how the leadership works and how such leadership decisions affect the community. I think the vast majority of users prefer a stable application as opposed to the latest and greatest(highly debatable) code, and yet that is not what has been provided. I will need to seriously consider my continued participation on this platform.
This is my understanding and these are my expectations as well. I would much prefer a stable system with less variable economic incentives rather than a system constantly in flux with a vision that seemingly changes on a Ned whim. It's hard to ask for investment when an investor's money can be significantly affected by multiple variables...and multiple changing variables from fork to fork.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't seek additional/better ways to increase SP utility - we absolutely need to do this, but we should do it in a manner that makes potential changes in returns more easily predicted/calculated and in a manner that ensures a higher degree of behavioral stability among users.
Nobody likes unpredictability. And they certainly don't like it when it comes to their investments. Since Steem is primarily an economic and stake-based system, we should be doing as much as we can to treat it as an economic/investment platform. Minimize risk as much as possible and maximize returns for those assuming the risks...and keep these risks and returns as stable as possible with each protocol change. If major changes are needed, then we better be damn sure that these changes actually have widespread stakeholder consensus and that they are implemented as smoothly as humanly possible.
Flying by the seat of our pants and testing buggy code on the production chain is horrifically irresponsible for all parties involved.