Curation is what everything is all about. The best curation is still manual curation.
Lacking mechanics like uploading your contacts to check whether they are already here (if you want to), the platform truly needs to help.
When it comes to trending, that should be highlighting the awesome content and if no AI is available to do that (difficult at this stage), then it need to be done manually.
There’s professional bloggers like Jason Kottke and Andy Bailey who have been doing this for more than a decade, Kottke.org for two decades already, and they have found huge following.
Steemit Inc has so much Steem they have ninja-mined they could easily use some of that to assist the platform, especially the community, and make this happen. Because, end of the day, on Steemit projects live and die with SP.
Thus, just like they have mrdelegation, they could use that Steem it for projectcuration and have those chosen curators contribute to influence the content seen on trending.
But that shouldn’t be all yet. Steemit also urgently needs a solid on-boarding flow. The FAQ pages... meh. I mean they’re good but too many re totally and utterly clueless what to do once they’ve signed up and got their keys. Regularly curated to trending authors could become recommended users. Awesome guides which were curated to trending can become part of multiple on-boarding tips.