Well half the things you don't like are indeed crappy things about Steem, the lack of good information at onboarding is a huge problem and there is a very steep learning curve that tends to eat up most new users before they ever understand how Steem works. This isn't helped by totally unrealistic expectations built up by the Steemit Inc marketing that you can just show up here and get paid to blog. Like anywhere else, you will only succeed and make money on Steem if you put the time and effort into it (or have a bunch of money to begin with) - that is the truth anywhere though, it isn't unique to Steem.
The other half the things you don't like are only half understood by you in the first place. I am not going to go through point by point as you bring up a ton of stuff here, but a few things I feel like I should address:
- Crappy content on trending page - there is a bit of delicious irony here as you have promoted your post here with a bunch of bid bots. You do understand that bid bots are the reason we have a bunch of crap on the trending page? Because people just pay $ to bidbots to get it there? Just ignore the trending page, that is what everyone does. Better yet, use a front end like steempeak.com that actually displays good posts in its home feed and doesn't rely on post payout to do so.
- RE reverse auction time (very early votes not counting as much as votes after 15 minutes) - this is primarily the case to take rewards from very large accounts or accounts with very large expected reward. This system actually serves to encourage votes for new users, it is the exact opposite of the conclusion you have reached. When a user can be reliably expected to have large rewards, other users set up automatic votes to come in early after every post they make - people do this to get a share of the curation reward that they know is coming from all the other upvotes that come on every post that this well rewarded account makes. The reverse auction time window makes a user balance the potential for making extra curation reward with the amount of the vote that is lost by coming in early. The portion that is lost is returned to the reward pool - and because the incentive is only there to vote early on posts that are already expected to earn a great deal, this serves to redistribute wealth a little bit by taking some of the payout that would have gone to the (already very well rewarded) author and instead redistributing it back to the reward pool.
A new user on the other hand has absolutely nobody jockying to get a vote in early on their posts. A new user has few followers who will even see the post. Nobody looks at "new" tag to find posts - except for brand new users like yourself maybe. Just make sure to use relevant tags to what you are posting about, your content will stay visible on the smaller tags for more than 15 minutes. The fact that your post might get past 15 minutes with no votes on it is actually a good thing for a new user - once your post reaches 15 minutes with no votes, there is a great incentive for someone to upvote it. They won't lose any of their upvote, and they will get a portion of all curation reward that comes after them. I personally look for good posts with 0 payout that are at least 15 minutes old, upvote them and then share them with c-squared to get more votes and eyes on the post - I make good curation rewards by doing so.
Cheers and good luck
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post. My point is that Steemit is very complicated and I'm not sure it has to be. I understand that Steem marketing is creating high expectations about making money but I don't think this is the main reason people don't stay. After all they spend countless time on FB, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc. The system is just confusing. Most people say we should ignore Trending page but the correct answer should be what can we do to change it. There must be someone who is responsible for the ranking factors on that page and elsewhere. Yes, I used the bots but because I didn't get any votes. And I wrote something original and didn't just download an image from the internet and upload it here. I see hundreds of posts like this having hundreds of votes. And people vote these photos only because they think others will vote too and make money. And the other thing that bothers me is that now Steemit has a new 'Managing Director', only she just started to use the platform herself and has no idea how it works. Anyway, I hope things will get better.
Posted using Partiko Android
one distinction to draw here is the difference between Steemit (a website / steemit.com) and Steem the blockchain. "Steemit" (the website) sucks. That doesn't necessarily mean that Steem the blockchain sucks. There are many alternative website front ends built on the Steem blockchain, and literally almost every single one is better than steemit.com. Steempeak.com is my personal favorite, but there are tons of choices.
There is absolutely no reason that a website built on Steem blockchain has to be complicated. All the fiddly bits can be hidden "under the hood" as it were, invisible to a user, if the front end so chooses. A front end could, for instance, automatically (and invisibly to the user) delay all votes cast before 15 minutes on a post until after 15 minutes, thereby totally sidestepping the reverse auction time window - and a user of that front end would never even have to know about reverse auction or think about if they should vote a post or not.
The truth is that steemit, inc (another confusing factor of course is that Steemit could refer to a company, Steemit, Inc - hereafter referred to as Stinc for convenience and also because it is appropriate LOL) has deliberately chosen not to work on the steemit.com website, instead focusing on improvements to the blockchain behind the scenes. I personally think this was the right call. If the website worked well and tons of new users had on boarded and stayed active during the peak, we would actually be in a world of hurt right now because the blockchain itself wasn't ready for more users. The amount of transactional data that has to be stored in the consensus layer of the witness servers is really high given the use case as a social media site where tons of small micro transactions like upvotes and comments are happening all the time. Until the development work to implement RocksDB solution is finished and more of these social interactions can go to non-consensus layers of the blockchain, the Steem blockchain is literally not ready for more users. So given that, it wouldn't make any sense at all for Stinc to focus on making the website itself work better. It would be like if a bus had an engine that couldn't make it two miles without bursting into flame - the bus company would obviously prioritize fixing the engine rather than making the interior of the bus more comfy and getting more passengers.
Excellent replies, and I agree! It's a common error to mistake SteemIt as Steem itself. @eSteem, @busy,@partiko (for mobile) are all good frontends. And as you mentioned, @steempeak.