Part of the appeal of Steemit is that there are only community standards. True it lets in unfounded claims etc. but the benefit is a variety of viewpoints. The community may at times upvote complete hogwash but that's a small price to pay for a system that has more freedom and flexibility than other social media.
In the future I hope to see the API lead to iterations of Steem front-ends which cater to different communities and their needs. For example I'd rather peruse articles with more science and critical thinking as opposed to conspiracy theories, religious writings and woo. Such a community could form their own filtration of the blockchain and hold their own standards.
My point being if it's submitted it's on the blockchain and that's fine. It's the filtering that needs some work so people can apply the standards they seek. If somebody wants to find what you consider poorly researched opinion pieces isn't it their right to find that here?
To be clear I'm not challenging your assertions about ETH. I'm making comment on your starting point about standards. By all means it's up to the Steem users to use their voting power to create standards.
No worries, your comment is spot on.
It's a little different than my point, which is that for the growth of Steemit today, blindly upvoting articles that are 1) poorly researched and 2) will antagonize or put off people who would fit in well with Steemit is bad strategically. For anyone from the Ethereum community whose first experience with Steemit was this article and see how successful it was, they would laugh off Steemit as a joke.
You can't please everybody.
Your point is taken. It's just that first of all I doubt reasonable people would blow off Steem because some percentage of the content is at odds with them. Secondly, and it's hard to phrase this properly without sounding elitist, do we really need people here who are so easily turned off? Consider that this is community generated content. You'll seldom find complete accuracy here although one would wish the best examples of researched journalism would receive the most backing.
Your call for quality journalism is commended. alas it's something that while we might assume cream will rise to the top people flock mostly to what they want to hear.
Humans.