I'm one of the "professional writers" you mention in your article. My specialty is business writing, or "copywriting" as it is also known. I agree completely that Steemit -- in its current iteration -- is very much like a casino. There is no logic to why some articles do well and others don't. Some of the articles I've put a lot of time and effort on have done poorly, while some that I have put very little effort on have done very well. It makes no sense.
On Steemit, everyone seems to be publishing for the elusive "whale vote," instead of writing for the masses. This isn't good.
I have the feeling that the more steemians wrote on steemit and steem and trend on the front page, the more it puts off people outside of steemit. And inevitably, the userbase will just drop off... We should be writing for the MASSES or respective niches.
@sabot, I agree that there is an obvious disconnect between quality and recognition. I see people busting to change this, bonding together as minnows, curating lost content and hidden gems, begging each other to read, to upvote quality. It's heartening but also saddening. From the article above:
I am even seeing a disturbing trend of articles crafted specifically to inspire a variety of angry responses. This way, the content is the comment section. Such an article is effortless to produce, if you can live with yourself, and the author can sit back and not participate, appearing to have merely expressed an opinion. Some of these trend and then people upvote them in anticipation of curation rewards. One understanding of "trolling" is that it makes provocative statements in a gleeful anticipation of the mayhem that will be caused. That trolling is regularly succeeding as "quality content" on Steemit should be extremely embarrassing.
This blogging platform was not created by bloggers, readers or curators. Medium has a dedicated staff of all of these adding immense value to its feed. This step was never done, and the results show it. I think there are attempts to do this now in Steemit, but as a whole, I don't think it's working too well. Perhaps in time, after all, it's still in Beta.
I don't think Medium will ever have a viable economics. Blogging is not a high income activity consumerate with effort required.
We still have gatekeepers known as whales.