We should recognize that the coin has become a psuedo proof of stake, and accept that proof of brain will always be gamed. The present downvote issue is driving many long term users away, and that will likely escalate under HF 21. Social media platforms will always have a lot of garbage on them, but people with guidance will find users and communities that they do like without hiding content. I think the downvote is unnecessary. There might be issues with copyrights, but perhaps a post, when timely flagged for copyright, can be rewarded to a steem inc owned account and rewarded later either to the author and the curators or to null (or to the accuser for their services) depending on the finality of the copyright decision.
Steem, inc, should recognize that people, sometimes through voodoo like tactics, have morphed the coin into basically a POS. In embracing that it is a POS, the company should [start to] offer more POS rewards in steem for inactivity or light activity based upon SP. At the same time, reduce the number of rewards for posting content to a level where bidbotting would be an act of charity instead of a business model-but at the same time not scaring away the present investors who have helped transmuted it into a quasi-POS state. The alleged whales upvoting their own junk posts might realize it is better to to hodl if the math is done properly as to not scare them off. The Whales who delegate to bidbots would have no more profit incentive to do so and can as they wish.
Certainly, this takes value out of posting content to steem it which seems to also be one of the pleas people are making. This may not bode well as to the Metcalfe's law, but neither would HF 21. Reddit seems to have done quite well without steem's potential. But aside from avoiding a lot of pain, Steem can focus on bringing in users through marketing instead of proceeding in HF21.
It needs to market itself to appeal to the present market place in social media, and there is a large opportunity that is being missed due to the present management at steem. They need to recognize the problems that are inherent in social media with the purges and exodus that is going on, and advertise their platform and perhaps even sponsor banned personalities to join their platform. When Milo went to telegram, he managed to have acquired 16000 users-not to mention telegram and gab have been receiving a lot of free press.
Granted steemit isn't developed like a facebook or myspace, but does offer features similar to youtube and reddit. The emphasis would need to be that steem doesn't ban ideas, and that steemit will be the new go to place to find information and hopefully to connect to their favorite speakers.
An auxilary focus would be to try to create a revenue stream through advertisement in the white space and to reach the point of profitability, and when profitable using equity to secure a minimum value that steem can reach. The trending system may be broken in terms of intended purposes, but this can be done on a typical CPM basis-and perhaps enhance [to a weekly limit] it to reward steem users a small percentage who may go on to visit the blog and/or follow the speaker.
It also needs to emphasize that the crypto transactions are free. Perhaps changing the steemit logo to emphasize the features might help to the broader crypto market. Three squiggly marks in a sea of over 2000 listed cryptos on coinmarketcap-at least it is in the top 100.
A further focus should be on presentation and building the community such as the creation of groups, [off chain] emails, and chats and instant messaging apps, and other apps that might be useful. Much of the development could be done without steem, inc. But development doesn't appear to be easy, and management's focus should be of making dapp development more accessible and let the community do the rest.
From the development side, I notice some of the software will not run on my hosted server for obvious security reasons. I don't particularly desire to run an at home server. Instead of relying on third party executables, it would be nice to just upload a php (or cgi) script and config file, edit the config file, then proceed to write dapps.
It would also be interesting to have an online console (with tutorial) to interact directly with the block chain where users could get to get to test non-traditional features of the blockchain to get a basic idea about what they can do before trying to fight with the installs or network changes/investments. I think there is a lot of untapped developmental potential in the blockchain if it were easier to access and people could more easily play around with it and get their feet wet.