Having been content creator and consumer on this platforms (sic) for nearly 3 years I have not invested a penny but what I have invested is my brain power and my blog. I sometimes wish that people would realise that as investments go, my time is my money.
There are many things I see wrong with this being a content creation platforms. A major one is the fact that there are nearly no consumers, just posts getting voted up in the hopes that there will be some curation rewards left once the big guys get their cut. Long standing Autovotes have made sure there will always be a two tiered post hierarchy. I don't say this as a grump, it's just the way it is. Competing with voting bots is not fun.
Another is I am pretty sure a lot of new audience is put off when they visit the home page only to see the Trending posts being about Hive backslapping and bitchslapping. Who the hell would dig any deeper to find the good stuff.
Still, I will continue doing what I'm doing, I'm happy enough, hoping for the crumbs of the original guards table to make their way down or for one of the curation trails to shine their light on me for a moment.
Yours truly
A disgruntled content creator who is doing better than most.
Oh yeh! and another thing that really gets my goat is why is there no private messaging still after all this time. Surely Memos could be fleshed out to provide this function.
I think some folks are working on that actually. Taking a different approach. But it should come eventually.
I call myself a software developer, and I even did work on a frontend application for Steem.
It gets my goat too. All that needs to happen is that any of these big frontends implements end to end memo encryption, as was intended by the inclusion of a memo keypair.
It baffles me that this one simple implementation hasn't been done, and you can bet that if I release a frontend there will certainly be encrypted transfer memos.
That alone could be used as basically instant messaging with how quick block times are around here. So much utility could be had, and I'm sure the crowd would enjoy and use it.
It's been years, and still we basically don't use those memo keys for anything. There's been dozens of hardforks, but still no encrypted memos! It's a shame.
Plenty of us do consider that time spent to be money spent. The time I've put into this could have been used working a second job, and that job would have paid a lot more.
No consumers is a huge problem. The main problem, actually. The bots are both a blessing and a curse. It's too bad they wouldn't be interested in finding a balance. As in listen to what we have to say, and work towards making good for both sides.
The trending page content can be a burden and does chase people away. I'm on the trending page. I'm typically trying to produce entertainment. Sometimes I think people aren't looking at my work because of what's around it. I feel other legit content producers deal with the same problem. I'm well aware of things that could hurt my progress, like over exposure, so I make damn sure I don't have two or three posts sitting in the upper slots at the same time. Others don't seem to realize that overexposure harms their brand. Makes everyone appear selfish in a way.
I know it's frustrating. You know though, a lot more folks would be successful if the consumer driven business model was in full effect. Again, that's the main problem. Actual consumers. Not actual automated votes. Unfortunately people get lured into that maximizing mentality and all that does is cause problems.