At the moment, I feel like the only people on Steemit are content creators. Which is logical, they would be the ones that are first drawn to the monetary rewards for their work. But it seems we do lack the content consumers.
On reddit for example, I'm more a consumer than a creator. Still, my vote is worth as much everyone else. Here on Steemit, it's quite different.
I understand the fear for bots giving lots of upvotes to their makers. But I would like to see a consumers vote have some kind of influence. Maybe not monetary. Maybe it would just mean that the post would be more visible. But someone who just visits Steemit to consume content and nothing else, is a valuable person. Especially now, when the platform is crawling with creators who are fighting for money, instead of creating the content they already used to make without the monetary rewards.
That's true, though the statistics prove that engagement and views are rising quickly. So definitely there are more consumers incoming. The cool thing is consumers can be paid too with curation rewards.
This is still a nascent platform. I'm optimistic that the platform will mature over time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to be paid any significant amount for curation, you'd have to create content first or buy a ton of Steem.
I don't think a consumer wants to be paid. I think he just wants to reward the content that he likes, preferably in a significant way. And right now, it seems to me like a consumers vote is worth almost nothing.
That's correct, the amount of curation rewards depends on your Steem Power holding. But it also depends on your work ethic, skill and understanding of the rewards system. For example, I make more in curation rewards with 50,000 SP than most whales with 1 million SP. When I was a minnow, I still made pretty decent rewards. The key is to find undiscovered posts and try to get the word out about them. Voting on trending posts is a sure fire way to never succeed at curation rewards.