What would appeal the most to investors is a functioning content discovery and rewards social media platform where there's actually an incentive for people to take part and engage in rather than one that forces stakeholders to defecate all over the front page if they wish to retain their stake.

Imagine how good SMTs or Communites would have to be in order to turn this place around if our economic incentives continue to force people to spam, self vote and sell votes. Realistically, what are the chances of Steem based SMTs taking off to the point where they're not just successful themselves but can carry the failure of the entire ecosystem when Steem is spirally down in CMC charts and Steemit is dropping Alexa ranks because there truly isn't any reason to be on a platform whose front page is a dumpster. SMTs and Communities would need to be impossibly, unfathomably good.

Now imagine how good a more reasonable economic system would only need to be to fix this. It just has to make an intelligent attempt at aligning better rewards with behavior we want, such as people to actually vote based on their subject opinion of a contents appeal. The answer is economic reform just has to be sensible. This is by far the most important and most cost effective change we can make.

It'll only be a small exaggeration to say that @Vandeberg could probably bash out a pretty sound economic system in an afternoon (maybe a week). Yet this would be the one change that would totally turn this place around. Not only that, a functioning content discovery and rewards system would greatly magnify the value of all the other initiatives. SMTs, Communities, Marketing. They won't get us far if our core value proposition is the one thing we're failing the hardest at.

For the record, no engineering efforts are being diverted. This is just the start of an important discussion