I've been getting quite into SteemIt and the whole Steem platform over the past couple of weeks, including making a fairly sizable investment in Steem Power (for me at least). So I believe in the technology and concept potential long term.
But one thing that's been bugging me from the beginning is that the so called "curation" doesn't really seem to be working, at least the way I think it ideally should. The best content doesn't get voted to the top. ANY content posted by popular users gets to the top. So really all this has created is a popularity contest of sorts.
So fine - it's a popularity contest - but still I wanted to try to find the good content that's not at the top of the trending list and it is NOT easy...I couldn't believe how much junk there is on here. Other similar sites do not have this much junk. I read Hacker News all of the time and there is GREAT stuff there. StackExchange always has useful questions and answers. Even Reddit has much more easily accessible content that I want to read than SteemIt does.
So the questions is - why is there so much junk on here? It finally hit me today. People are paid to post here (or at least have the hope of getting paid) so they post...and they post and they post and they post and it's mostly all just for the sake of posting. And just to be clear I think most of my posts (including this one) fall into the same category. I've considered writing a blog for years but I never did it, and now here I am posting for the sake of posting.
On all of the other sites I mentioned people only post things when they actually have something to post - they have a question, they have an answer, they wrote an article, etc. But here we just post post post post because more posts gives us a better chance to get noticed and get more followers and more upvotes and more chance to become popular.
So this all makes me wonder about the future of SteemIt - if more and more people come on and do the same thing that everyone is doing now then it will just keep filling up with more and more junk and actual good content will be even harder and harder to find - if it will even exist on here at all.
I don't know how to fix this exactly, but I'm thinking that more of the focus needs to go to the concept of curation rather than posting. The vast majority of people are consumers of content, not creators[1], so if we want SteemIt to really be mainstream then I think it should focus more on content consumers rather than content creators. If there can be a way to earn good money by actually finding and surfacing good content - and not just anything posted by popular users - then I think this can really grow to a great platform.
Otherwise we will just have a bunch of consumers (like myself) pushed into trying to be creators, posting a bunch of junk, and then eventually leaving and going back to being consumers on sites that have easy to find, good content ready for them consume.
Anyway, since I'm not very popular here this post is likely to get lost in the same great big sea of junk of which I'm speaking. But nevertheless I am going to post it, and we'll see how it goes!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)