What about initiatives like utopian? By encouraging high quality moderated content (specifically open source stuff) with the SP they got from ned, they've contributed to the community. Not taken from it. I think we need 10 utopians on the steem blockchain. One for books and stories, one for articles and science stuff, one for personal blogs and one for art... you get my idea. I don't care about cryptocurrency stuff, but it'll still be there in the trending section for the tag "writing". It isn't on utopian.
It's a battle on 2 fronts: reducing the payouts on spam, voting circles and scammers on one side, and creating an interface and reasonable incentive for quality content creators on the other. It's nothing simple, but worth seeing how it develops.
Not powering down just yet. :)
I agree that creating initiatives like utopian would work if implemented correctly which there are curation groups doing just that, it just comes to people getting together. I think that if curation trails got extremely popular with support then things would work, and if we kept Uncle Sanders and Steem cleaners around to handle spam, plagiarism, etc then we would ultimately benefit as a community, but for this to work we would need the whales on board and not all of them want to cooperate with eachother, let alone dolphins, minnows, and little reds.
Curation groups still rely on the same platform where finding quality content is, and I've said this before, like finding a needle in a haystack of shitposts. Utopian only displays utopian posts that are moderated and rewarding according the platform moderators' perception of contribution.
What I am trying to say is that developers contributing through utopian don't need to know about some girl's pretty selfie. And the girls uploading mostly selfies usually care little about open source development. And so, these two types of content just shouldn't be under the same "roof", especially not one as badly designed as steemit.com Something more redditlike would have been easier on us all, I believe.