Can you remember what attracted your attention when you first landed here on steemit? If you don’t, let me remind you. It’s the dollar sign at the bottom of every post.

You were intrigued. You read the posts on trending that’s making hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars and decided that YOU can make posts like that yourself.

After a week or two of anxiously waiting, you got your account approved. You dove in eager to make hundreds just like those in the trending page. Heck, you’d settle for $20 or $30 per post.

You made a few dollars with your introductory post and you are certain this will work.

And then you discover it’s not a walk in the park.

Even if you poured out your heart and dedicated several hours in crafting your work, nobody seemed to notice. But with much effort, you made some connections, you commented on other posts and some people are actually following you!

Now your posts are getting a few dollars here and there. Nothing much but you’re now EARNING money from your posts. You’re ecstatic.

Then came the pay-out.

You received SBD and some SP. But the amount is smaller than what you are expecting. Scratching your head, you are compelled to dig deeper into this mystery. You find out that the amount with the dollar sign is not what it seems.

You only get 75% of that amount as the author and 25% goes the ‘curators’ or those who upvoted your post. Out of that 75%, half will be given in SBD or steem-backed dollars while the other half will be in SP or Steem Power. But you’re getting fewer SP than SBD.

More head scratching. Then despair. You feel like you wasted your time. It all seems too complicated. Then a glimmer of hope. You finally realize that SP is actually worth more than a US dollar!

Your post actually made more than the dollar value posted below it!

Which brings us to the point of this post . . .

The dollar sign on the bottom of the posts messes up your mind. And
I suggest that we change it to something more accurate.

Steem.supply creator @dragosroua calls them STU (Steem Token Units).

I feel that changing the dollar signs to STU’s will have a profoundly good effect overall on steemit. And here are my reasons:

Confusion will be avoided.

There’s too many things you’ll have to wrap your mind around with when you’re new to steemit. Removing the dollar sign will simplify things significantly. One less thing to get confused about.

The dollar sign doesn’t represent the actual amount your posts are going to get anyway.

If that doesn’t sound compelling enough, read on. Removing the dollar sign could actually promote more engagement on steemit. Hear me out.

The Psychology of Money

Ever wondered why casinos exchange your money for tokens? Sure, it would make it easier for the dealers to not to have to check each bill if it’s counterfeit or not. But there’s a more practical reason why casinos do that.

Players don’t feel they’re losing REAL money when they’re playing with chips.

I have a feeling that the same holds true for upvoting on steemit.

Steemians are being stringy with their upvotes because of the dollar value associated. We feel, albeit perhaps subconsciously, that we are LOSING money by upvoting other posts.

And in a sense, this is true. You only have so many upvotes available every day. And you can either use those upvotes for your own posts OR to upvote other people’s posts.

Now if your voting power is only a few cents worth, this is not a big issue. But as your SP becomes bigger and bigger, you tend to be careful (perhaps too careful) with your votes.

There are some (a good example is @surpassinggoogle) who freely upvote other people’s posts. But those people are few and far between.

By removing the dollar sign on the posts, it will be easier to upvote others as you won’t always be reminded of the dollar value of your vote.

Will Removing the Dollar Sign Negatively Affect New User Recruitment?

I can imagine it will. But right now, that doesn't really matter. We're growing by 300 to 400 new users everyday currently. This is happening because, apparently, approval of new members is done manually.

So, unless this is fixed, whatever positive effect the dollar sign has on new membership is negligible.

There are a lot of things to fix on steemit. I'm not a developer but removing the dollar sign probably won't take up much time to implement but would impact steemit positively.