It sounds to me you're saying the problem with voter apathy is that we don't have a unified portal design.

I am just presenting one potential solution among many that will come along as well as pointing to a direction for those who are developing similar portals. Some of the tools that have been developed in the past have been a complete information overload for the average person who is new to this technology. The EOSVotes.io initiative is just a first stab at a much bigger problem, and should not be taken as the end-all be-all solution to solving this problem. It's just one approach to presenting the information with a voter outreach and education layer that explains the who, how and why these things are important to those who have no idea why they would even need to vote on referendum in the first place. This initiative should be separated from the larger problem I am pointing out in my OP - that bad usability is a significant barrier to more people engaging with these protocols and platforms.

I didn't mention referendum voting at all in my comments, other than to say that's not what my comment was about.

In our conversations, that is the real issue that you should be addressing, at least in my opinion, not throwing stones at making it easier for people to use the referendum contract by educating them. Having one initiative everyone gets behind in the short term to prime the general public on what it is when referendums start popping up in wallets and various interfaces in the ecosystem is more about education than any kid of centralization. People are free to integrate referendum voting as they see fit in the wallets and portals that they trust, I was never saying anything to the contrary. But if only one single account and person has the ability to post referendum, that to me is the real issue that needs to be addressed, not any of the things you are arguing. We are in agreement that centralizing voting on referendum through one design is not the goal, because it was never what I was proposing in the first place. My design strategy proposal and the accompanied education initiative is 99% about activating voters and steering other interfaces, wallets, etc... into some ways they might solve this design problem for the people using this stuff.

STEEM has 70% voter engagement by token (not including Steemit, inc holdings as they do not vote). I do a report on this every month.

Well, considering 53% of Steem is held in the @Steemit account, I think those numbers are a little fuzzy to the true nature of whether the system is actually working or not. But that's a completely other discussion. In my mind, a functional DPoS based blockchain protocol that has an engaged and informed base of token holders can overcome stagnation if 1. the token supply has a good distribution and 2. token holders large and small are educated and engaged.

This and mention of my "inflation rewards as a Steem witness" sound like a personal attack. Is that your intention?

If that's how it came off, I apologize. I am a little frustrated you are spending time and energy on picking apart one proposed design strategy and education/outreach initiative (among many) rather than putting that same energy helping to solve some of the problems facing EOS right now.

My friend @billbutler has been actively improving the BitShares DEX, and it's much better now than it has ever been. As for STEEM, there are many other interesting, well designed sites like https://busy.org/, https://elegance.blue/, https://dlive.io/, and so many more.

And I love them all. There are many ways to use the underlying blockchain to solve different problems and present different information. I am speaking about the actual voting UI and education that supports it though, not the UI for projects built on top of the chain.

I take issue with you saying DPOS chains have failed because the evidence I see says otherwise.

I was saying Bitshares and Steemit have failed in addressing a user centered approach to their UI / UX within their voting system as well as the corresponding education to activate token holders, I didn't say that DPOS failed. Don't put words in my mouth now! See the two components I mentioned previously that would make the existing DPoS systems a little more equitable and improvements move faster. That is just my opinion though. Do you agree with the things that are going on in EOS right now? Wouldn't you like to see referendum pass that would refine and improve some of these things? This is why my focus is on usability of the referendum. The past has shown us over and over again (on the voting side) that apathy of the smaller token holders do not act as a counter balance to the whales who will vote mostly to keep things as they are, especially if the existing system benefits them.