Now THAT'S a post!
I can't help but have my mind linger on that beginning part though.
Market's crashing, banks wanna' buy billions of dollars worth of bitcoin? HMMMM. I DUN LIKE IT! Not one BIT! No body sell to any banks, or i'll annoy the heck out of you!
Besides THAT off-point, I've been thinking on this kind of stuff a lot as a newbie, as it seems many of the people who have invested a couple years into this platform are really bringing it up more often.
The question that I and a lot of other people I see are wondering is, what does steem want to promote? And you are right that Buzzfeed posting those kinds of "Wanna eat chips upsidedown while parachuting" blogs seems mindless and empty, but it's a LOT better than someone just posting a single picture they took off the internet, a single run-of-the-mill sentence they thought of on the fly, and then waiting to get dollars paid out to them and then complaining when it doesn't happen. And I've only been here for maybe a week.
I've had to learn that just because someone has a "60" next to their name, it doesn't mean their post is going to be valuable. I've had situations where I went to read something and found out it was just an excerpt from someone outside of steemit, a little credit to their name on the bottom, and a picture of a pretty lady. This person had a high 60 rep, and the rest of their posts on their blog were literally just random pictures and one-sentence comments underneath them.
That seems like a rather self-defeating point of the system, doesn't it? If ANYTHING can be upvoted and a rep can reach especially high numbers just because you can supposidly buy them, then what does that number represent? I guess it taught me the lesson of not necessarily having too much faith in the surface, and doing some background checks on the author before I upvote something that they didn't even make. (Though they had the cleverness to make sure it didn't qualify as plagiarism, I have to give them credit for that) For all I know, the only reason some people have that number there is because they delegated their votes to a bot and then had those bots upvote them so that the number went up. That doesn't seem entirely fair, though I can't say it's not rational.
But it seems that the current system might be fixed to promoting either REAL content people would pay money for, or an actual product, as you said. And yes, good content can also count as product. There is no real product or incentive for someone to come here and post meaningful things when they can in all reason just belt out easy, meaningless stuff and get a better payout and votes for it. 30 minutes to write out a meaningful post versus 30 seconds, same payout. You would need to be IRRATIONAL to choose the first -- I guess I am irrational in that my ideal for content might be totally mundane, simple-minded and whatever-else-have you, but I'd like to see a good amount of thought and time put into it, no matter what it ends up saying in the end.
Now, in the end of the day, I do have a lot of trust and faith that this platform will seriously become something, whether there is more chances to get business owners here through advertising mechanisms, or if they start reviewing the system to create incentive for that they DO want in the next coming months. The pressure and the demand will be what changes the situation. When it comes to people and societies, if there has been one thing I've learned in my measily low-amount of years alive, it's that people like to wait until they have no choice but to change things, and then things magically start getting better.
Still a raging optimist though! A tiny-fish optimist, but hey, we all gotta' start somewhere, right?
Sorry if whatever I said is nothing new, but at least to me this is a valuable discussion, and I thought I might throw 2 cents into it, even if it's a small, whimpy 2 cents.