Every day I hear people talk about how great Steem is and how we're gonna take the world by storm and blah blah blah.
It's not gonna happen. At least not with the current tools.
The reason being is that one important myth about Steem is complete bullshit. Good content does not get rewarded. Good content can be rewarded but it's often not.
Right now there are dozens of minnows posting amazing content and dozens of others buying their way to the top.
No one reads trending, yet that's supposed to be the best of the platform. We all know it's full of crap. Yet no one wants to flag them.
Is it any wonder? If you flag them, you may have to face their wrath. They fucking know exactly why you flagged them. They used bid bots on a crap post. Yet they still act like you had no legitimate reason to do so.
And yet occasionally I hear people talk about it exiting beta.
I sure fucking hope not! We are nowhere near ready. Steemit is a bare basic platform.
We were never given the tools to find and share good content so that we can curate together. All we have is the resteem button, which is limited by the UI. No one wants to resteem because it gets in the way of their own posts since the UI doesn't differentiate them enough.
We all have a responsibility to curate, upvoting good content and flagging bad, yet we weren't given the tools to do so. So what do we do? Some form groups using tools outside the platform and others wallow in frustration because even when they find a really good post they can't do anything about it.
Until Steemit gets a groups feature that allows you to curate with friends and easily find good content, I can't see it as anywhere near ready to exit beta.
They say that programmers are never finished coding, but there is a point where they can be satisfied with their work if they publish it, even if they could improve it.
Right now, Steemit is just a barebones basic representation of something you could do with the blockchain. It's nothing to be proud of, because every day people are proving its failings and becoming rich off of it.
If Steemit were near ready to exit beta trending would be a few awesome articles with a few things you don't personally like. But it's not.
No one can find really good content easily and share it with their friends. That is a failure of the platform.
Well, it's a failure if you think this place was actually made to reward good content.
Because there are no built-in tools to help with curation, and it seems like small private groups are often the ones ensuring this place isn't a total shit fest, it means that spending time on making good content regularly is discouraged. Curie can't hit you every day, so why try to make curie level posts every day? Might as well just rant for a few hundred words and be done with it.
We shouldn't need groups like Curie to ensure posts get rewarded. Sure, they should help, but good posts should occasionally rise to the top on their own. As it is, I'm not sure if they ever do.
Beta video cassette by Larry Gilbert September 16, 2006 CC BY 2.0 (source)
