Given that what you describe is exactly what we seem to be seeing, congratulations – you have a firm grasp on the situation as it stands.
(That sounds like I'm being an asshole, but the truth is I absolutely respect you for seeing the world as it is. Seriously.)
I haven't become so self-interested that I'm interested in using bots to vote, or to be more forthright with what it actually is, paying for upvotes. I'm not that invested into the "game" that Steemit describes. I mean no offense if you are, and I fully admit that STEEM is currently purely just a way of keeping score that you can exchange real money to avoid having to play the game.
Okay, maybe there is a little judgment there.
You are absolutely correct there should be more incentives in the system for people to manually curate posts, or to be clearer about what we mean, actually curating posts should change the user's experience in a way that makes them happier, that gives them gratification. As it stands, while I curate posts because upvoting things that make me happy makes me happy, I'm not laboring under the delusion that doing so will really make the things that I'm upvoting more visible to other people. My contributions as a new user/minnow are minuscule, and even taken in aggregate with the other minnows around me are swamped by the influence of a handful of whales with a swarm of power-delegated bots.
I know that. It's disheartening to know that, and discouraging to know that, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one that feels that way and probably bounced off the system and walked away feeling disenfranchised within the first few days of being on the site.
I don't know if the Powers That Be care enough to shake up the status quo to make that not the case. At least not on Steemit. Maybe there is/will be another steem blockchain social network tool which is interested in new user retention, even at the risk of diluting the pool of STEEM.
I keep writing, but I'm not holding my breath.
Great article