We actually have planned to add advertising to Ginabot notifications where people can purchase ad slots which come in after x notifications, Ginabot has 8000+ registered users.

The problem is actually vote apathy, you can put out all the great tools you like but if whales have busy work lives they won’t use them, i think there were some curation centric websites that for the life of me I cannot remember the name, but likely never used. Whales are few on Steem and not enough to cater for the demands of a growing userbase, there are lots of active minnows but their votes aren’t worth much, even cumulatively, the distribution on steem is not great so curation defacto won’t be great.

I also caution against heavy downvoting and reducing trending values drastically, people came to steem in their droves when trending posts were $1000 plus, with the hopium that they would get a fraction of that, right now with the highest cream of the crop being $150 let’s say, new users won’t even stand a chance to get anywhere near, post promotion at least puts new users on equal footing with insiders and people who know the system, the power to get visibility is in the hands of the user which is what crypto is about, empowering those without a voice, not subjecting them to an oligarchy that determines according to their own bias whether your voice is worth something or not.

The other narrative I subscribe to is that Steem is no longer a one-trick-pony as it was in year one, authorship and curation is not the only use case, we have games like SM and nextcolony, steem can be used as a stateful backup of your wordpress data and gamestates too, we have forums that use the rewards model as tipping rather than for visibility etc.

The Steem community should be focussing on efforts to rather build business grade wallets, easy multisig, hardware wallet compatibility, merchant integration, debit card integration, gift cards, referrals/affiliate programs etc. Focussing on downvoting to me is a race to the bottom by alienating people that could later have been buidlers and by making steem look mediocre with lower post values on trending.

Edit: There has been some user sentiment discussion in slack where it seems users don’t want their content value to be determined by the “rich people”, that is quite archaic if u think about it. I think Steem should try push in the direction of Proof of Human and individuals having equal weight in voting content and number of human votes determine value and visibility, if we can solve that problem while still keeping identities self-sovereign then steem would have solved that which giants like twitter cannot and would once again put us at the forefront of innovation.