Steemit is reaching that tricky stage where early adopters become resistant to change in service of "protecting their existing benefits" while also being aware that continued growth depends on making changes in such ways that the community becomes attractive to newcomers
Couldn't have said it better myself.
however... one being the imbalance between the weight/influence given to automation/scripts/bots vs. actual human interaction and curation. My actually reading, voting on and engaging in interaction on 50 articles a day seems to have little "value" to the overall picture, compared to an army of bots that clearly do not "read" or "evaluate" or "interact with" the content. As a newcomer I look at that and think "Why should I bother?"
This is an excellent point and the reason I proposed to remove curation rewards, I believe they are harmful to the platform and that no serious business is going to integrate steem if it's run by robots.
One thing though, bots don't have more influence per se, it's just that many whales chose to subscribe to guilds which are mostly operating with bots.
The other missing factor is external engagement. As an experiment, I wrote an "article style" post the other day and "distributed" it to the general public through the niche channels I usually use when I write something. It took about 72 hours to pass 1000 page views, and it's still going. These are actual human eyeballs, actually reading the content, making them actual potential new Steemians.
I think this is very difficult to do on the blockchain. People could be paid per views for example but the blockchain can't tell number of view..
Something like a referal program could work though, but like I said it would be a waste of time to market steemit right now, it just isn't ready for a broader audience.
Part of the "problem" (I think) seems to be that there's an inherent contradiction between the concept of "decentralization" and "building community."
I know what you mean but I don't necessarily think decentralization is in contradiction with community building, I think the problem is human nature, humans always want more power and more money. This is why to me the solution is to create a fairer system( based on merit like you said) where the incentives are aligned with everyone ( not just the 0.2%).