Totally agree.
...and if a whale finds it withing 7 days. Otherwise, it's worthless after that. I'm not sure why big names would want to use Steemit except to cash-in as a supplemental strategy. YouTube actually allows you to make money off your content after 7 days -- so if you're popular, you've got passive residual income. Here you're done. If you're not a whale, you need to find a whale or pay to play with bidbots, promoting ...
Rant over. The more I've thought about the 7 days to $0 flaw, the more it bothers me.
Did you mention passive income? Lets see, high profile Youtuber joins Steem. We have already seen few, biggest and most recent one being furiouspete. By making few videos to DTube he has gained a nice piece of Steem Power for himself. This Steem Power gives him power to allocate some of the daily reward pool to whoever he wishes until he sells them or the blockchain isn't running anymore. So no, making a one video to DTube gains you rewards for a long, long time. Longer than on Youtube even. And as we are in the early days, even few Steem could prove to be very valuable over time. So making a one video, which nets you few Steem that you power up, could net you a lot of money over time. Don't forget the curation rewards either.
Hopefully this eases your mind. So I don't see why not big names wouldn't join Steemit. The competition will only get fiercer, and the number of Steem earned/millions of subscribers smaller for introduction post. We already can see the trend. One by one the benefits are realized by individuals who then take action.
My rant is over.
Big names are going to be interested and if they like money (who isn't) they'll be courted by the whales here and play along. Few will oppose the platform's structure on moral grounds. I am going to go ahead and guess that Joe may smell the bullshit from a mile away but he might see some big enough paydays to make him bite his tongue. Or not, who knows, he's been vocal about other things before so it wouldn't surprise me. And yes, most would just use it to supplement their income, as their existing audience base (if they care about actually influencing people's opinions) are much larger on other platforms. I think we're going through a similar cycle as the last boom/bust with the price and celebrities where once the payouts are reduced they'll realize that it's relatively hard to actually convert their fanbases into naturalistic income growth on steemit and leave.
Totally agree with @igster and @charitybot. All valid points. For big names, Steemit is a good supplemental strategy to further cash in, but I believe it a difficult place to build a brand from ground zero.
For average folks, the long tail of prior work can be valuable. It gives a reason for grinding. One day, those posts on how to fix an Amazon Kindle will be found by the right people, who will be grateful and want to throw a little money your way. The more posts you have like that, the easier it is to have a sustainable income without trying to churn out "trending" posts.
Btw... I love Steemit and the community. I've been thinking about releasing a couple projects here, but this "7 days to $0" problem made me reconsider my entire approach. Instead of relying on Steemit, I'll simply cross post content here as a way to build a presence. For the passive revenue side, that will have to come from elsewhere.
The only form of passive income on Steemit I can think of is auto-upvoting, or creating your own bid bot... But those come with drawbacks if it looks like you're upvoting inappropriate content and your public-facing image matters. I'm fairly new, so I'm still trying to figure all this out. (Curating is not passive. And investing in Steem could be a passive income source if prices go up, but those funds may not be liquid enough in the short-term to cover costs.)