Made an entire post dedicated to improving the discovery features of Steemit.
Steemit incentivizes quick, ethereal content because it vanishes so quickly. The only content that lingers on the Trending page tends to come from the early investors with high reputations.
Overall, if steemit wants to open up the long tail of content creation, the content it celebrates cannot be throwaway popcorn posts, Steemit bragging, follower celebrations, and whales being whales.
Those are both good articles.
The discovery issues can be fixed with the UI I hope.
Regarding "popcorn posts" I would like to see more long term or repeating curation cycles so authors are less enticed to post clickbait and can focus more time on creating better content.