Anyone that's been following me is aware of where I've stood on the overall reach of Steemit. It's been lacking in the diversity department, in part due to the content, but mostly due to the short-sighted nature of the core team. I've expressed these concerns in a previous post, "The #circlejerk needs to END NOW!".
To the team's credit, they've made the landing page now default to your follower list, and this is a real improvement - thank you! However, it's not enough! Allow me to elaborate.
Firstly, I don't have all the time in the world to peruse Steemit and learn who is and who isn't a good writer, nor will I expect this person to continue to write about things for which I give a shit about. This isn't Twitter, and it's one of the reason's Twitter is horrible, in my opinion. I tried to use Twitter, I tried very hard actually. It was a horrible waste of time that resulted in noise I never cared about.
This is the issue with Steemit still. And while solving this issue through other methods is still a challenge, the approach of following people is guaranteed to deliver noise 100% of the time. People are complex, unique creatures that have diverse tastes and preferences. By virtue of that, unless someone devotes their account to only writing about specific topics, which hasn't really happened yet, people will write about a variety of topics. Some of these topics I will care about, most of the others I will not.
Now, I realize that some people just love following other people, like some kind of sick obsession. It does work in some cases, like Hollywood and celebrity gossip, for instance. But Steemit is not that, and shouldn't focus on that, per se.
Now, I do have a couple quick suggestions that could become a start to improve the homepage. It's actually the same exact thing I mentioned in my previous post. However, I do think that the ability to follow people, in conjunction with the ability to follow tags/topics, is another positive.
So, my suggestion is the same; allow people to follow tags or topics of interest. I don't care to follow just certain people. I may want to discover what new people have to say about a topic as well. And while you may say, "You can go and find these people to follow", that's the point - I'm not interested. I'm busy, and the last thing I want to do is go around trying to find things. It's too much work, it's not worth it, and there are thousands of other content sites vying for my eyeballs that will deliver up content that fits my fancy, with half the effort.
Until Steemit focuses on the end-user, the platform and price, as I stated in the article I wrote months ago, will continue to fall. It'll reach the bottom soon enough, but it will remain there.
