Nice notion, but there is a lot of collusion on steemit. And it truly is about who you know, not what you provide. Countless articles and pieces go unseen, but are they worthless?
I have had my work seen only due to the wonderful friends whom appreciate and upvote my work, but some may never experience a rep level beyond 55 and that is saddening. I understand the sentiment of influencing good work, but there is a balance to everything and steemit is missing a lot of those principles in the state it exists in today.
Steem, like all social media, is and will be partially a popularity contest.
C grade content that reached 1000 people is worth a lot more to the market than A+ grade material that reached 2 people.
Combine these two facts and it is what it is, reality. You can play along, watch, or quit, but you can't really change the fundamental game.
I wrote this as a reply to a comment. But I think it echoes what you are saying and how this can be solved.
"In my opinion the real problem is with the content discovery. Since whales already have enough followers their
posts generally gets upvoted if the content is good. The problem is with the content discovery for the new authors. Not many people are ready to spend time reading the posts of their friends and followers. They are constantly looking at the posts by whales so that they can upvote them in the hope of getting some curation rewards.
So we will need to turn the tables around give more rewards for the discovery of content by authors whose average earnings are low. Since whales with large number of followers already get enough votes and rewards, the curation rewards for discovering their content should be reduce. Adding curation rewards for resteeming can solve this problem to a certain extent. Remember that an upvote doesn't increase the visibility of a post, it only increases the rewards for the author of the post but it doesn't help in making the post reachable to others. If possible we should identify who are having a network effect in making content more popular and reward them accordingly. That will create a level playing field. Irrespective of whether you are a whale or a minnows you will be in the lookout for the good content and resteem them to make sure that it gets the visibility it deserves. Wildspark is already doing this successfully and may be steemit can learn from it.
If we don't address this problem Steemit will turn out to be like the Ghost cities of China where there are lot of high-end skyscrapers that have no occupancy at all. Just that in steemit there will be lot of users writing posts but not enough people reading them even if they are worthy. I hope Steemit addresses this problem by the earliest :)"
I agree with the essence of your argument - curation is under-rewarded. Unfortunately, it's one of the toughest things to reward correctly via algorithm.
I don't yet have a solution.
there will always be problems as long as humans are involved.
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise. :-). Full steem ahead.
As true as that may be, there are a lot of things that can be fixed on this platform (in terms of equality).
People were saying this over a year ago and Steemit is still here. It might be better to think of Steemit as a place to share things you enjoy without looking for monetary compensation.