I'm still so new here, and I'd imagine with all the comments on this post that 1) I'm not the only one feeling what you're talking about and that 2) it's easy to get lost in the noise.
2 really highlights the issue for me. I'm a content creator. I haven't even really learned the curation, delegation game yet. But I "do stuff" and then right about it. I've been doing that for years. I really WANT steemit to work. I'd love to get paid for my actual creation of content based on the quality and merit of it, but like anything that depends on social interaction... there's a popularity show going on here.
I'm also at a bit of a loss on how to overcome the fact that my content has a 7 day life. How many people go back through old content and read about it? How many people search STEEMIT first for information? Not many that I know. We still go to Google.
Even when I follow someone on here, it's hard to watch their content easily. It's hard search their content and then with the way the resteem is listed on the same page as THEIR content, it's hard to find their original content.
I think there has to be some changes to the blog, the way the feed works and what "following" really means on the platform to get to your ideal listed in "scenario b" above. I think changes to these would swing some of that power back to content creation and effective curation.
But I'm just the new guy... :) Thanks for your thoughts on this.
I'm also rather new. I think the 7-day shelf-life is a double-edged sword. (Whoa! That's a lot of hyphens!)
It can be frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into something you write, and have only 7 days for people to find it and share the love, ie steem. Especially when you're just starting out, it can be very difficult to get it in front of enough eyeballs.
On the flipside though, I get the sense that the 7-day clock gives each post a kind of urgency. If and when your content is found by a fan, he or she is perhaps more likely to upvote it if it's within that count-down then they would if they were curating all content that ever got posted on steemit.
Thanks for the feedback. I guess the quest for the "new" just doesn't seem like it has depth to me. I mean, one option I suppose is to give some comment love on an old post. But I have to work out what that looks like.