Thanks for your explanation! I see it as a very exemplary action that you take the time to explain your intentions.
When I downvoted, the post had a pending payout of about $50, or $25 after curation.
That's okay for me. I don't want to become rich with these posts and I have no control over the incoming votes. Fact is that the community likes to support me and instead of earning nothing from one day to the other, because of a few big players controlling the SPS, I now earn something for my work again. I never intended to sell as much as comes in and I will only sell what is needed to keep me running. The rest will be powered up.
The majority on Steem is here to earn something and I think it's a dangerous new way of thinking to prevent as many people as possible from earning STEEM with the goal to prevent as many as possible from selling. If people don't earn enough (in $ terms), they will start powering down their collected shares instead. We can't fight against the peoples love for Steem. I understand that people like you invested their life into this and it must hurt to wake up day after day and see the millions shrinking more and more over such a long period of time, but maybe we are too much in our heads and too much focused on failing instead of winning.
What's the point of onboarding new people, if they are not allowed to sell their earnings? We are fighting against inflation, which is built into Steem to reward people and at the same time to increase their shares. If people don't earn enough, they can't keep their shares. Securing a huge part of the pool only for investors who don't intend to sell is a way more dangerous solution in my opinion, because it has the potential to hurt Steem's reputation massively.
As I stated a few weeks ago, I think we need a real (maybe inbuilt) burn mechanism. For example, the SPS Fund could partially be used for this. We now have over 158K SBD in there. One may think that it's good to have those funds available for future developments, but I think we need them now the most. To be honest, If I could, I would burn at least 50% of the fund today to support the price of STEEM.
Another temporary solution could be to create (real) @burnpost's, in which the option allow_curation_rewards is set to false. Did you consider also burning the curation part? I then would vote them regularly and encourage others to do so.
I wish you the best and I hope you can find a sustainable business model. Perhaps that could include a small user fee as you suggest, on-site advertisements, etc., or even possibly (hopefully temporarily) disabling some of the most resource-intensive features so the hosting cost can be reduced during this challenging period.
I plan to add Paypal for direct donations in the coming days. This would be one way to circumvent selling my rewards. I'm not sure, if ads would work in my case. Their scripts would need to run outside the SteemWorld DOM, then it would be a possible solution. I will investigate further possibilities.