Since I've been on steemit for just one week and am completely new to cryptocurrency, I don't think I can adequately assess the impact of the proposals above. However, as a new user I find kevinwong's posts and all of your comments very useful. I can also give my perspective as a new user. First, the idea that new users will get disappointed and leave after working hard to provide content that gets barely noticed, is understandable, but I don't think one of the main problems. My first real post was recognized by #steemitbloggers, which was great and made me realize that there are many on here trying to help. My second post, which I thought might get more attention since it discussed an interactive steem tag explorer that I made, got a few votes in the first hour or so and then nothing. But in hindsight, that is not really disappointing: I have only been here a week and have few followers. It will take time to build recognition. Besides, the same post on my (rarely used) Wordpress Blog would do about as well, or even worse. The real problem is that I'm not finding a lot of diverse high quality content. Much of the quality content is about Steem and Steemit. And while those with lots of steem power do produce quality content, even their not so great posts tend to get high rewards. In general, steemit just doesn't seem to be working to reward quality. Even more disturbing is quantalysus' analysis showing that Steem's Gini Coefficient is very close to 1 and has been for some time. In the real world, that would have already spawned a revolution, but on Steemit the masses really don't have any power to revolt... other than by leaving. Despite this, the platform is still a grand experiment and if you think of it as just a place to have a Blog, it is easier not to get disappointed.
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Thanks @toddrjohnson. Yes, new users getting disappointed etc isn't the big problem. The economy that rewards worst behaviours the highest is. Getting rid of this market force will have a lot of positive effects on the economy, but of course all this at the "expense" of new users and low powered users voting for themselves or have their votes worth something, but again I don't think that's a problem at all.
There's actually quite a lot of good content, but just gets buried and doesn't get noticed. @curie is a curation communities that does pretty well to help new users and old get recognised for the content they produce. But the current economy can't go on like that for too long, as it's tearing down the content and attention aspects of Steem.
Thanks for the information on @curie. I'm now following them. And thanks for upvoting my posts. I'll continue to work on providing quality posts, supporting others who provide quality, as well as those who are striving to improve Steemit. I do think the UI here could be improved to help surface some of that good content. A large part of my background is in UI design, but I'm not sure how I could make a difference here in that respect.
Hmm how about a UI-prototyping community?
Steemit.com's UI person is https://steemit.com/@pkattera I think. Other than that there's the @sndbox guys who's doing that @creativecrypto magazine-layout website. Yeah just out of my head atm. Oh and also there's where you can list and find out the apps around Steem (not sure if they're actively updating it) https://steemprojects.com/
Just followed @pkattera, but his last post was 5 months ago and last comment 7 months ago, so I'm not sure how active he is anymore with UI work here. I'm finding add-on's that help a bit with the UI and finding content, but since quality has both intrinsic and extrinsic properties, it would be best to have a UI and economic reward system that recognizes that. By intrinsic properties I mean properties of the content itself, such as whether it is original vs. copied, accurately achieves a stated goal, etc. By extrinsic I mean factors like the size of andinterest/needs of an audience, as well as other things going on in the world. For example, I find the Mathematica StackExchange site to have very high quality content both intrinsically (because there are so many detailed answers theres) and extrinsically (because I use Mathematica every day and often need to get help on StackExchange). On Steemit, I think higher quality content could be found much easier if the UI supported communities that could both curate and better organize content around some theme. This would address the extrinsic aspects of quality (that of audience interests). Some of this is being done organically here, but the UI doesn't really support the efforts, so it is done through browser add-ons, curation accounts, and other apps. That makes things really messy, especially for new users who are likely already overwhelmed by everything Steemit. The strange thing is that the models to do this area already out there on Facebook, where they are clearly successful and of value to users.