I think the design of Steem is based on a utopia, thinking that everyone will be well behaved, authors creating only quality and original content, curators will only curate quality content after reading them and appreciating them but this is not how it works.
I think most of these issues are coming due to the fact that there are not enough active users on the platform. Before joining Steem, I used to post on some Facebook groups related to vermicomposting (worm farming) and my posts got good engagement thanks to the 10 - 20K membership of users interested in the topic. Now how many active users do we have on Steem? And how many of them is interested in the topic you are writing? There is not enough audience.
Content creators from other platforms might be attracted to switch to Steem to make $$ but then they might loose their audience and will start giving up when they need to do "trickeries" (upvote bots, self-upvotes) to make those $$ but their posts ending up being un-read. In order to get a bit of the audience back, I might post a link to my Steem blog to FB but then people will engage with me by commenting on the FB post not on a Steem dapp because they don't have a login and signing up is a pain or they just don't believe in crypto.
Talking about regular curators, who are they? Are they really curating our posts or are they auto-voting them?
Paying bots for upvotes to get into trending don't always guarantee exposure to a real audience, it might just trigger other bots that follows vote selling bots in order to grab a piece of the curation reward.
I'd love to see another Dapp that combines native Steem comments with other commenting services from other social networks. And maybe even hide the $ payout thing unless you are loggedin and the blog you are viewing is yours. This would allow dragging audience from the non-Steem world. Non-steem users don't have to know that the blogging platform is based on Steem, content would come first.
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You hit a lot of good points. Steem's communities are currently quite ad hoc and we currently lack ways for communities to form web front ends with the community content on them. The paid for content is a bit of a false bill of goods except for very rare exceptions. My observation is that people will support content creators with follows and perhaps autovotes. It takes time to get those connections and content quality doesn't speak as much as community engagement.
Steem isn't going to pay the bills for most people - but that's never stopped other social media platforms. I imagine a steem plugin for the major forum software might convince a few major communities to join us on the 'chain.
I'm not sure if I'd say the design was based on utopia, but it was definitely assuming people would see the long term value in building up the ecosystem. Personally I think a lot of the behavior we see is short sighted and ultimately counter-productive.
I get a mix. There is a decent amount of auto-votes but I auto-vote myself and see it as just supporting an author who has established a reputation for producing quality content. I am sure that if I started posting utter drivel then many of those auto-votes would fall away - and so they should.
I don't always have time to vote in real time but often I go back and read through my auto-votes long after I've voted on them. I guess it's another pragmatic lesser evil :)
Yea utopia is probably exaggerated 😄