- I think the initial reason for promoting these users was to help a couple of minnows. The statistics showed us that only a dozen of posts/day have been somewhat rewarded. It's less than 1% and it's sad and very frustrating.
- What I've learned here: quality, utility, gain, value are some very personal terms so spreaded into the ocean of steemit content that we can't even use them properly. Everybody is taking this too personally and don't want to see a bigger picture: these values are for community or for user's prosperity ? Is there any relevant discussion about these values ? I really don't know anymore. I had my "battles".
- The current distribution of rewards will not last. 1% winners and tens of thousands of struggling minnows will damage the community on long run. Users will flee (and not the easy to get ones, un-important). Therefore a rethinking of the algorithm and spreading the reward to curators, creating profiles, areas of interests, groups, curator's weight, etc should balance the game.
I think that through this type of discussions we can improve the system (read: create ideas).
IMO things would be better if curation reward was removed. People will always upvote what they like. On the other side, I feel like curation is essential for the platform. Curation or upvotes are generaly only popularity contest not a production of value. I also feel that users will flee from the platform if they are not compensated right but things we are talking is a product of curation reward pursuit.
Also, scalability of the platform is a big problem since we see those problems with only 6000+ users active each day, imagine how would things look like with 10 or 100 times bigger active user population.
When I say curating a post I mean commenting it, not only upvoating it, of course. Comments are very important because the feedback will improve the user's experience. I know a blog (the no. 1 rated in my country) that has mainly simple posts, not useful posts at all, but the comments ARE GOLD, PURE GOLD.