Why anyone would think the finding a bigger fool to buy your steem is sustainable is beyond me. If it hits a dollar again do you think anyone is going to buy it? No one wants it at 30 cents.
The idea was to keep increasing the amount because there would be more and more users, but that's not happening. People leave in droves, and new people are shut out. There is a concentrated effort to upvote introduce yourself posts but after that your choice is buy steem or make 1 cent per blogs forever.
I don't have an answer to fix it. Get rid of bidbots and all the high steem power users will just vote for each other. There is very little altruism, the occasional buying of a wheelchair, but day in and day out it's just greed.
The whole thing was missold. It's not about rewards. If you focus on rewards you are bound to be disappointed. It's a platform to be creative and find other creative people and their creations. I like to write, the rewards are the cherry on top. If you come for the rewards then you are doing steem wrong
Are you interested in creating content ? Are interested in reading something that others have created ? If yes, just do that and forget about the rewards, think of this as Facebook with a twist. Billions of people spend days on Facebook and write stupid things and share them and read other stupid things that others have shared. And there are no rewards. Do the same here, forget about the rewards, they will be the nice surprise at the end
I agree, if we didn't have bid-bots, circle-jerking would return as the biggest problem.
There are several options on the table to increase accountability of voters. E.g. higher curation rewards and free downvotes. Many witnesses claim to support these initiatives but have yet to act on anything. There is also Steem.DAO, which could encourage initiatives.
Some of the Dapps help support new users. I post using actifit every few days. Actifit are great for distributing rewards fairly based on activity. I'm sure several of the other Dapps do that as well in a similar way. There are still opportunities to turn things around.