What you're complaining about is a systematic problem with Steem and how the platform is designed. You can't fix this by saying, "Whales, do better!" As you put it, if we had a couple more million users than we have now and were much bigger, how do you expect whales to properly upvote everything and read content?
It would become a full time job, but without considerable amounts of funds invested, it will not pay as a full time job to curate. After hard fork 19, in my view, the "selfish whale culture" improved because the rewards were more widely distributed among the community. Yet even with more whales and linear rewards, it does not make the work any simpler.
It's not the case whales have the time to constantly curate content to distribute rewards.
If you want Steem to go somewhere, we need to recognize that most social media does not favor a traditional blogging platform. Facebook is not a blog. Twitter is a micro blog. Old-school blogging just isn't hip and this is what Steemit is.
If you really wanted Steem to go somewhere, we would put 100% of the community effort toward the DTube project, and get advertiser integration into that platform to boost monetization and we would attempt to compete with YouTube directly.
Steemit will never be facebook because Facebook is not a blog. Steemit will never be twitter, because on Steemit, micro-blogging is considered an abuse and could get you flagged if the rewards were too high for posting 140 characters.
What you're complaining about here is just something you need to wake up to... "Steemit is the way it is, by design. It is unlikely we are radically going to alter that design away from whales upvoting." If this is the nature of the system you are dealt, this is what you got. Improvements can be made, but without scratching the model and redesigning it, you are never going to get away from "Whales upvote to determine rewards. There are a limited number of whales, who are limited in the amount of material they can cover to upvote."
The Solution - The solution to this issue is a better designed system launched by another project team in the future. Steemit is great and I do not see anything being better than it any time soon. That said, something better can be made, so eventually, it will be made. Sadly, the way to do the better Steemit is to have a corporation do it. A corporation is going to be driven harder and faster to succeed, and this hard fast drive, I have seen to be missing from the Steem and Steemit development communities. One reason is this is the nature of open source projects. Open source is great at producing solid, bug free code, over long periods, enabling people to freely use the code base. Open source is terrible at competing against other corporations.
Without that drive to succeed, Steemit will not beat out any social media giant. It can't happen. To be a social media power house, you have to think ahead, and be constantly driving and scaling, and doing investor capital rounds to fund growth faster than revenue. For a while, (maybe still happens) it would take multiple days to sign up for a Steemit account.
Do you know how many serious corporations would permit this? If I owned a social media corp and my development team told me it took multiple days to get a user into the system, I would fire their butts for incompetency. Steemit corp then is incompetent, and I cannot tell you exactly why that is. Maybe it is because they try to be profitable for the size Steemit is at so it limits their ability to grow and change. I'm sure there is an honest reason for it, but incompetent results is what we have received from them.
A real social media platform on blockchain is going to launch with the goal of user adoption, first and foremost. On the backend, they are going to monetize with ad revenue. Ad revenue only arrives if there is a decent user base in the millions. Really, it needs hundreds of millions.
This gimmicky thing we do on Steemit where people are paid by inflation... it's gimmicky. A platform that just had tons of users and monetized ad revenue, but paid people in crypto would be better. This way, people are paid by views, and there is an economic value attributed by advertisers to content creators for the views they can generate. It's a free market system, rather than a gimmicky system.
you have said everything, @crypto-investor. now I rest my case
hello @crypto-investor, what do you think of our response to the news of BTCC closing down? > https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@blockrush/btcc-will-stop-trading-bitcoin-5-important-things-you-should-know
I've posted similar before. The site needs to find a way to attract advertising dollars if the mythical STEEM at $10 goal is going to be achieved.
Without a solid plan and implementation team to get advertising dollars involved, STEEM will be a cool experiment, but unlikely ever a major crypto.
OMG! You are awesome @crypto-investor!