Perhaps Steemit will be a giant experiment but I'm not sure about that, just because Steem itself is what is powering this website, and I think Steem is going to continue to power along nicely. d.tube is doing well with its upgrades, and it won't be long before new Steem-powered sites start cropping up. Steemit will always be the original and I don't think it's going anywhere.
That being said, I absolutely agree with curation rewards for downvoting. This site's content is highly incentivized by rewards, so I think more people would downvote if you got credit for downvoting! I do wish the devs would listen more, although most of them are really receptive and are doing their best to navigate through everything. We are still in Beta after all.
I'm not talking about problems with the Steemit website, I'm talking about the economic flaws in the underlying Steem protocol. Problems with the Steemit website can be addressed by competition from busy.org, Steepshot, eSteem, d.tube, and all the other interfaces. Problems with the underlying protocol could take them all down. If the incentive structure is broken such that spammers are constantly attracted and can't be dealt with, the whole community will eventually be overrun, good content will be buried, investment and growth will cease, and eventually productive users will turn to other platforms. This needs to be taken seriously, and I see no indication that the largest stakeholders (affiliated with Steemit) are giving it the attention it deserves.
The problem is, these people are invested in the platform, and they do need it to remain functional in order to keep their fortunes, but they aren't inherently responsible for the website like a founder would be per se. So, that's probably why so many feel...not responsible. In that way, I agree that this is an experiment. This is the first real community run on blockchain technology (really big one anyway) and the whole point of blockchain is to not have one big guy on top making all the decisions. This has inherently created a bit of chaos, but it is interesting to say the least.
I do agree though that things need to change if the website is going to survive. I think that's why so many people on the bottom are trying to pool together to get the attention of the higher ups to show them just how damaging this all is.
Ultimately we need a spam bot. Like, a really good spam bot. Do you remember having your first email and after a while, like, all of it was spam? Then the companies finally wisened up to the idea that no one wanted to sift through all that junk just to find their emails, and that if they wanted to compete with other email services, they had to create a technology to be able to tell the spam apart from the real emails. If that was possible nearly 20 years ago, you can't tell me that some of the devs can't figure out what the spam on this website is and take it out.
The libertarian side of me also believes though that it's everyone's responsibility to help maintain this website if everyone is to benefit from it, or at least then contribute part of their earnings to the development of better bot technologies. We can't possibly expect to profit from the whales but not give anything but our blogs and good looks in return. That's why I think what @pawsdog is doing is absolutely essential, though I do agree that downvoting should be part of the rewards pool.