"Don't check the teeth of a gifted horse".
I've never considered this to be a wise saying. If I am gifted a horse, wouldn't I want to keep it healthy and know its proverbial value?
To me, Steemit is a kind of a gifted horse. My little experiments here last year gained me a nice sum of BTC in my wallet. But it is my belief that if we do not check the teeth on this horse, and give it a thorough dental treatment, so to speak, it won't be winning any races, especially against well-funded and well-marketed social networks and content hubs. Which makes for very sad marine life in the Steemit ocean.
Having given this a lot of thought in the past few days (as I return to my experiments with Steemit as it is today), I believe I've found the most "rotten teeth" in the mouth of the Steemit horse.
Reason 1: It's complicated
Registering, understanding one's Steemit wallet, figuring out boosters and bots, cryptocoin markets and the ways to get noticed on Steemit is NOT SIMPLE. I am lucky to have background in tech journalism and some understanding of blockchain technology, but most authors, photographers and other content creators simply do not have the skills. All that learning and skill acquisition take time. Which brings me to our next rotten incisor - time consumption.
Reason 2: It takes too long
Assuming you've waited out the period to get your account approved, and began uploading content, you're still a long long way from seeing ANY kind of money from it. Promotion, commenting on other content to get followers and engaging the community on the chat and Discord take a lot of time and energy. It's a long term investment.
And even if you do get lucky and loved by a whale, you won't receive the payout for a week. My guess? A significant percentage of users simply give up too soon. And it's not only their fault. Steemit requires too much patience for the Instagram generation.
Reason 3: Technical Instability
Do I really need to elaborate? Since my return earlier this week, Steemit.com has been about as stable as my mood during that time of the month; it can crash at any time. Sure, there's busy.org and eSteem, but a platform with so much downtime is simply not one that can retain a user-base.
Reason 4: Lack of Engagement
One of the main sources of large payouts I got last year was a novel I started writing and publishing to Steemit. My hope was that other authors, readers and artists would comment and respond, encouraging me to continue writing. That did not happen. I got one or two loyal readers that had no way of "bugging" me to write. So I lost the passion and vanished for a year, taking my voting power and Steem Dollars with me. I am sure I am not the only one.
Reason 5: The Game of Whales
In the Game of Whales, you earn or you basically waste your time. I was hoping it would change in the past year, but it hasn't. Getting paid is still about getting lucky rather than having genuinely good content. You get curated by a strong bot, upvoted by a whale or referenced in a whale's post and watch that payout soar. Or you can spend hours writing something well thought-out, and get paid single cents.
Such success or failure of content is in no way indication of its quality. In fact, I am quite certain most people don't bother reading or viewing most posts they upvote. So instead of a content platform that rewards authors and artists, Steemit is becoming a kind of bizarre stock market of upvotes and cliques of well connected sharks.
That's one seriously problematic tooth that should not be in the mouth of a horse we want to race.
I might come off pessimistic, but I am not. I am here, after all. Still steeming along. I see projects like 
Follow, upvote, comment... you know the drill. All images are CC0 via Pixabay, not including memes which are memes.
