Admittedly, as someone still pretty new here, this site feels a bit like someone said, "what would happen if we build an AnCap social media site?" Everything has a profit motive and money purely dictates power, consequently, much of the voting feels hollow. I will say that due to proactively finding the right users, I've had much better interactions overall than on facebook so far (I feel your mileage will vary over there due to your personal connections, much of my friends feed is the mundane mixed with the occasional conspiracy theorist, while the Ribbiting Science facebook page suddenly died off years ago when they really started pushing the algorithms hard).
I think the issue with the 'outvoted by copy/paste' is more of a universal issue of quality vs quantity. If you don't already have the power to boost yourself/having spent time networking, then it doesn't much matter what you post. I've seen simple 1 picture memes get 100 times the reward that a high effort essay I put up on here gets but that's also true of other sites as well. I feel you might be butting heads against the natural human inclination towards the minimization of effort on this one.
I'm too new to have experienced a downvote issue but it sounds like a surefire way to kill the platform in the long-run. Seems akin to handing out miscellaneous unbalanced weapon selections in a crowded theatre and mentioning that the first person to reach the ticket booth gets a massive payday - sets up a terrible incentive structure.
The crypt skepticism feels like something that will just have to be aged out of on a societal level, the current crypto landscape reminds me of the old period of 'Wildcat banking' in the US before there was a unified national currency system. The weak currencies will die out and eventually you'll see governments and societies adapt to wide-scale usage once scaling issues are solved. For Steemit itself, I think the biggest hurdle is overcoming the "I get paid to use social media? What kind of scam is this?" mentality rather than crypto skepticism specifically.
All very good points @ribbitingscience . Re downvoting there is some pretty bad stuff happening here. For example a the 2 founders fighting. One of them downvoted the other, left a negative comment then upvoted his own comment to the tune of $2500 USD! This is just one example I've seen.
Oh dear, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Hopefully, that's been sorted because there's nothing that'll sink a site faster than drama with the dev team.
Yes there is a flat earther in Steemit here that has a fair bit of Steempower that could flatten my posts. Given that I've been the target already of an "Electric Universe" person (possibly because of my profile in amateur astronomy) I worry a bit about that.
Ugh, while I've been fortunate enough to not run into any members of the flat earth cult, those electric universe people are insufferable (ran into them after posting a review of an Einstein documentary on another site). The only thing, that doesn't involve a complete overhaul of the voting system, I can think of would be to decrease the effect of an individual negative vote.
Encouragingly Ned pulled his vote, so all is not lost. The friction is over EOS being developed by Dan as a competitor to the STEEM/STEEMIT platform, so understandably tensions are high.
Ah, that's understandable then.