"On Steemit's system, you are made or broken in the first half hour."
This is exactly right. If you don't get the votes right away, you're post is sunk and everyone trying for curation rewards knows it, despite the 30-minute waiting period. They're looking for big payouts, so if the bots don't hit it or it doesn't get immediate attention from dolphins, your only hope is pretty much a whale vote, just to be seen. The time elements for curating are pushing dolphins and minnows to mostly seek what they think has the best chance of trending, not what they actually like.
It's not even the money that bothers me. It's the fact that I put a good amount of time and creative effort into my posts and they barely get a chance to be seen before they're buried - because attention spans seem to be decreasing in order to get enough upvotes in, with the hope of a miniscule reward. Minnows are hardly noticed, so they turn to curating for rewards, but it requires quantity over quality at that level. They're often creating just to be noticed and they're really not rewarding "quality" content. That's a lose-lose proposition for everyone.
But how can this be corrected? We all notice different problems - or similar problems - but how can they be fixed? Or can these issues be fixed at all?
The system is not organically working. It's contrived how people are voting. They are aware ahead of time how the math works so they vote based on the math and not on how they feel.
While it goes against my principles of how this should site should operate, it almost feels like it would work better if people didn't know how to game the system from the start.
Doesn't it seem very silly that a person has to wait for a period of time before they will vote for something? If you see something you like that is worth rewarding, ideally you should just vote and get on about your business, but instead people will wait 15 minutes or whatever to upvote. This leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I know your average Facebook user that comes here in the future will think all of the bots and gaming the system is rubbish.
I love the idea of the site, but we got work to do, ladies and gentlemen.
I think that Indexing content could help with these issues, and I'm sure the dev's will be working on this..
Steemit is still in Beta. It just needs some time to develop. I would also say that, Steemit.chat is a great place to promote your posts, and yourself by joining in with community discussion.
Whilst the environment is, how it is, users certainly need to go to more extraordinary lengths to be noticed. But it is more than possible!