Because the attention span of an average internet user is so short, I can understand why Steemit has been designed this way. There is just much more demand for short lifespan media.
But personally I'd love to see a way to reward also longer lifespan content. My suggestion is to have several different blockchains which have different reward schemes to optimize certain kind of content.
- Fresh content. Twitter-like short messages, memes, breaking news, video streaming. If content is older than 24 hours, very few are interested in it anymore.
- Blog-like content. Essays, opinions, commentary, longer news articles, etc. Stays relevant from a few days to a few months. Almost like Steem is now, but adjusted a little bit on the longer term side.
- Book-like content. Long texts. Stays relevant for years.
But until we get to that point, we just have to admit that Steem can't satisfy everybody's demands at the same time. To get the biggest possible network effect, we need to please the crowd that is easiest to attract. After we have a lot of users thanks to network effect, we can start to explore ways to satisfy the demand of smaller niches.
It was not "designe" this way. This is a change, made by one developer, disagreed with by others. And, if you don't build the value in from the beginning, the site is highly unlikely to become more relevant over time, due to entropy. Things in this universe rarely become more organized.
So far the disagreement has been just opinions without any good plans how to actually make things differently. It will take a lot of time and resources to make big changes to the system which the critics don't usually understand.
Then why was it originally the intent, it seems, to make the payouts continue? The talk of developing quality content, only to shelve it 30 days in is bullshit. That's not how content creation works, something that people who think appealing to the lowest common denominator can build a quality platform don't seem to understand. It creates a need for an ever increasing volume of content to serve a larger audience and all of it will be short lived crap, or self referencing.