I agree on the Welcome page being bland. There's way too many links for a layman to have the patience to go through. The presentation of information could use a revamp.
The 'Theme Park' idea you had proposed looks promising. Among the 5 weak points, 1st and 5th seem to be main ones. The search function is poor and there's no easy way to find and read old posts that "disappear" after a couple of months.
One solution I thought about for that is - what if there's an option to segregate posts in our 'Blog' into categories, similar to pins in Pinterest, to add a visual touch to it while making posts more accessible. Posts about steemit could be in the 'steemit' pin, poem and drawing in 'art' and such.
That said, Steemit still is in beta so we could implement new features and suggestions listed by you in the future, more final version of the website. Let's be optimistic!
That's covered by tags (#art #poetry #steemit etc.).
What we need is a general design makeover. On Steemit content needs to be pro-actively searched, instead of being actively offered. There is no user retention, no incentive for staying on the site. On YouTube content that is related to the one you clicked on is actively offered for instance.
Yep, but since the tags can't do much about old content getting buried in our Profile, pins in a user's Blog could make it somewhat easier to find posts according to category.
Youtube-styled curated suggestions will definitely keep the users hooked. However, there's also the disadvantage of lack of diversity in opinions consumed by them. Meaning, they would be shown only one 'side' of the story. If the content suggestions are constantly shuffled, then it could be a great add-on.