In my opinion, Bidbots and Curation Bots are killing the platform as they keep the vote pool focussed on the same group of assigned people, irrespective of what that person posts. So how does a 'newbie' get traction if a 'machine' or line of code is doing the voting?
Secondly, the 'New' page has a retention of about 40 second before a post has disappeared. So getting noticed is pretty damn random. I know it is possible to click a tag and then new but that is not instinctive. It would be good if one could 'subscribe' to TAGS such as 'Music' 'Cooking' 'Food' etc. and then when in your profile and you select 'new' it gives a dropdown to your selected tags and one can then navigate to all the new 'food', 'music' etc.
I have been here two years and still manually curate and try greet new users but it is becoming a 'zero sum' game.I keep reading "Excellent" and "Good" content ...... but what criteria or characteristics does a post require to meet these subjective labels? The 'Trending' page is full of cr@p posts (by my subjective evaluation) and yet there are many Steemians toiling each day producing what I believe is 'quality' content for no or extremely little reward. Two examples I can think of offhand are @jaynie and @mrprofessor ... now these are not 'Self Improvement Blogs' or 'How to make a million dollars in Crypto' or some other life changing thesis ... but what I expect from the Steemian community .. sharing of cultures, lifestyle, cuisine and just general human interaction.