Great article! I agree with you on almost all of your points!
If Steemit is to succeed, we as a community should not be dictating what is and what is not good content - that is why each user can vote using their own power according to their likes and dislikes! People who want to work as a group to support specific content types can most certainly do so by delegating and/or joining citation trails, but we should not be telling other users what they should and should not vote for based on same arbitrary and subjective criteria.
Your paragraph here hits at the heart of what I believe is the major problem with Steemit :
I mean really, do any of you see quality original content on Facebook? No, of course you don't, because most people are not capable of creating interesting content. So what do they do? Post about last night's dinner, or check in that they are at the mall, or share other people's content with their group of friends. Even on Twitter, you are either looking at a tweet with 280 characters (is that good content?), or a link to what is often someone else's content. If Steemit wants to seriously get a piece of the social media pie, then we are going to have to allow 'normal' social media behaviour. Why are we limiting people here to having to create? Shouldn't they be able to be rewarded for interacting in the same way as they do now on other sites? Now that would take off!!!
Too many people on here who have a lot of clout believe that they are the final arbiters of what should be considered "quality content", and anything that goes counter to their beliefs gets censored and penalized. For example, people say memes have no value, yet there are many websites like 9gag and imgflip that have huge amounts of traffic, users and page views, which are the true currency of the web. These sites have very lofty valuations, yet they would be considered trash by many of the whales and too bloggers on here.
So-called "quality content" is meaningless if people don't care about the subject matter, and conversely, the biggest stinking pile of shit content can have huge, real monetary value if it appeals to the masses and generates traffic and pageviews! Should a well-researched and written scientific paper get huge rewards, even if only a very small number of users actually care about the content & feel it has value? Similarly, should a meme that hundreds of users enjoyed, but which only took 5-10 minutes to create, be relegated to trash bin because a group of users believe that type of content is of little value?
I think it is ridiculous how some people on here try to force their ideals of good and bad on other users through censorship and flagging. Who are you to tell other people what they should and should not enjoy?!?! Even more so, when Steemit is supposed to be a decentralized platform where all users regardless of their power have a stake! We currently have a very small group of whales forcing their ideals on the rest of the community, and behavior like that are what will be the death of this platform.
We should all be doing whatever we can to grow the active user base and encourage diversity in content - that is the true path to creating value in a social media network! And people should need no further proof than to look at the valuation of Facebook, where nearly 100% of the content would be considered trash by Steemit standards! Are we all really such content elitists that we would spite ourselves by suppressing the ability of people to create and support the content that they deem worthy using their own personal criteria & beliefs?
Otherwise we should just abandon all hopes of STEEM/Steemit being adopted by the masses, and just accept that this platform will be nothing more than a circle jerk for a small, select group who create what is deemed by themselves as "quality content"!
