The whale pool will not build itself. Membership and the level you choose determines how much upvote percentage you will receive. It really has nothing to do at all with the blogging or rewarda platform. Though we can use it to put somethings like send messages to steemit behind a pay wall to prevent spam and abuses. I appreciate the feedback it means I still have not made things clear enough. I will work more to cut the clutter and focus on explaining our mission. Building the whale pool will require small amounts of funding from members. Buying Stish directly works but is cumbersome to assign to who deserves the added steemit support. Especially when someone buys it annonoumously. Membership levels allow us to assign participation and percentage of rewards all at the same time to a member of steemthat. The membership level impacts your whale pool support. The amount of Stish you possess, discounts you get in the store, exchange rate of steemthat tokens to stish.
There are some incentives to support the whale pool verses just getting free upvotes. Some people still may game the system. We cant stop it but we can slow it down. The scammers generally will not spend 1.99 to exchange their rewards tokens to Stish even if Stish is selling for 10 per Stish. Scammers are just that way. We will use all revenue to build the whale pool as the stronger it is the more people that want to join and the more people that want to join will eventually drive the price of Stish up. Ill take my chances on a longterm payday and if people do not see the value in what we are offering they are missing out.
With regards to blogging, the social portal, and almost all of the other features and benefits they are still free whether you become a free member or not. Not everyone that uses our website cares about Steemit or the whale pool. Many just want to blog and earn Steemthat rewards tokens. Some just want Stish so they can be in on the ground floor of something special. All members could automatically be assigned free membership and this is not even an issue. I will work on it.
Thanks for your reply. Seeing value in something is not always as clear to someone else as it is to ourselves.
As I explained, I personally don't see the value, which could be attributed, possibly, to my just not getting it. As I explained, I don't know much about the crypto-currency world, and I really have no urge to learn the intricacies. The rewards for posting on steemit were enticement for me to join, but minor. I do think it's likely that, some see receiving Steem as an incentive only to get more Steem. If one can get rewarded for junk posts, they're not ashamed to pursue that path. Nor should they be. The potential for abuse exists - it will be exploited, no question.
I look at however much Steem and Steem Dollars and Steem Power I have as something that could be valuable to me financially at some point, but I also remind myself that it could all disappear in a flash potentially as well. What I mean is, its actual value is debatable when you factor in the potential insecurities with crypto-currencies, the exchanges, etc.
I've no plan to delete my steemthat membership. If you're gong to auto-assign to steemthat members the 'free' option, and make things a bit more clear on how steemthat is going to operate, I'll continue to evaluate.