I've only been here since late January. But almost straight away, I began to suspect the same thing. Observing other accounts, that started at the same time as me, and how they've managed to hit the top of what's trending has solidified these suspicious.
I have a long (and growing) list of people like you and @just2random (and myself), who should be the backbone of the network.
But I'm not sure that we are - or if people like us were, maybe we aren't anymore. Maybe the real backbone is the people who buy in with tens of thousands of dollars worth of SP and SBD, which they then use to purchase their way to the to a high rep and the top of the front page. Unless they are doing it for the sake of vanity, the content is no longer important; it's just a vehicle to generate a return for whoever bankrolled them.
Alternatively, us non-wealth content producers are important, and the Steem ecosystem will collapse without us. People seem to forget that 100,000 minnows potentially bring more value to the network than one single wealthy user.
Iv'e a bunch more random thoughts on this: the balance between proof of stake and proof of brain, ways partially and voluntarily collectivise earnings, what might constitute effective strike action on steemit, etc. But they're all over the shop, so I'll try to get them in some sort of order before posting.
tldr; You aren't the only one thinking about this sort of thing, and how to fix it.
I think its a balance. People who invest large sums of money into the system have a right to earn a good return on their money. If they don't earn it here, they will take it elsewhere and the Steem price is all about supply and demand at the end of the day.
Content creators need to be rewarded appropriately too or else they leave and their content goes with them.
The deck is probably stacked to much in the favour of money at this stage, but how to come up with a better system is the problem. They changed the author/curation reward pool split last year and the amount of curation plunged. So even when attempts are made to solve problems it can have unintended consequences.
Hi @samueldouglas,
I actually think one of the biggest issues with Steemit is not being able o control your feed at all. I think quality people would have better reach to their potential audiences if we could control the tags we prefer to keep up with.
It is still early days for steem though.
I tend to watch specific tags like #philosphy, and get @ginabot ping me when people post using specific words - my feed isn't always useful - this proabably means I should unfollow or mute some people.
That said, many tags have terrible trending content - it's not just the overall trending page.
Yes, this could well improve once we have more people and more diversity. But some of these improvements might need to happen in order to attract those future steemians.
I agree, surely this improvement wouldn't take much?
Oi!!! You two!! Stop stealing the content of my future posts :P