How do we make Steemit even greater?!

I love steemit, but….

So i have been part of this wonderful community for little under a month, and i have liked the vast majority of it. I do however have a point of discussion, that many people have undoubtedly thought of, and brought up, before.
Do we reward the proper content?
At this moment, the user @berniesanders has a very popular post about a certain user abusing the Steemit reward system. The user has apparently been giving “advice” about trending currencies, and has received very handsome rewards in return. I don’t want to go too much into the ethicality of whatever the user @haejin is doing. But i do agree with Bernie that there is an inherent problem to it, if we want steemit to succeed. You should check his post about yourself and make up your own mind https://steemit.com/steem/@berniesanders/haejin-still-raping-the-reward-pool-is-ned-involved (on a slightly ironic note, Bernies post is now sitting at above 800 bucks, which is quite amusing)

The ideal reward system

For me, the ideal reward system will reflect the effort that goes into it. As Bernie has pointed out, many of @haejins post have taken little effort to put out, yet they received several hundred bucks in payout. Meanwhile many steemians are experiencing the “struggling artist syndrome”, where they put in a ton of effort, only to create a post that is very ill recieved. I see many people creating awesome art, writing amazing texts, cooking delicious food, spreading genius knowledge, and much much more. And while a lot of it fortunately get properly rewarded, a ton goes unseen, which is very unfortunate. Whether this is due to votebuying, bots,simply bad luck, ghosts or something completely different is unimportant.

The issue is that this creates frustration in new users. Seeing a post that has taken 10 minutes to throw together, can cause a new user to give up, if he or she has spent 10 hours on a post. Naturally, every beginning is difficult, but we need to find a way to keep new users engaged. This leads me to the main subjects of interest of steemit.

Reaching for a broader audience.

Now, according to @berniesanders, @haejin reeps in 6% of the total reward pool, an insane number by any margin. But besides the issue with the payout, it points toward another, more serious issue, if looking at steemits growth.
The issue is that a lot of the new users come to the site with the expectation of money. Even steemit themselves have chosen the motto “Money Talks”. This also means that a pretty big portion of Steemits content is dedicated to finance/ money in one way or another. The fact that 6% of the reward pool goes to a single guy speaking exclusively of financial advice speaks to this.

Now i have no numbers on this, and i don’t believe that talking about money is an issue in itself. I just think that we need an equal amount of traffic in all the other areas for the website to properly succeed. Sites like reddit has every subreddit imaginable (And a heck of a lot of unimaginable ones where one should never, ever go), with a ton of active users creating amazing content. We should aim for this as well on steemit. And if we only focus on money (This is of course exaggerated, there is a lot more content than money, but there does seem to be a pattern), we miss out on a huge potential user base.

Maybe a solution would be for the new user to declare his or her favorite subjects, which in turn will affect the user's feed. That way new users will automatically ripple out into their subcategories of interest, which could bring more life to them. We are much stronger together, let's help eachother :)

Now, i’m not saying that this is a giant issue by any means. Tags like life, photography and art are all doing great, i am just saying that they could be doing even better :)
As of now, i don’t have a solution for one user recieving 6% of the reward pool, but this does need to get fixed so we can reward the ones deserving it.

I have already been rambling on for far too long, so i will end it here. I truly enjoy steemit, and i want it to succeed, so let’s all work to make that happen.

Have a great day people, and an awesome December!

Cheers