I agree with most of your post. One thing I'd like to expand on is original content. I just want to be clear that I don't oppose original content, I just don't think it is a necessity to promote discussion. I think any content that gets users to engage in discussion is good content, whether it's original or sharing a link. Obviously stealing content is NOT good, and I'm not a fan of copying and pasting an entire article, but I don't see anything wrong with sharing a link to something that helps users engage in a discussion. I suppose I'm thinking of it more like a message board, I use to run my own and plenty of topics were links to another source, with a small amount of commentary by the author of the thread, and those were sometimes the best discussions.
My overall point is, I think something that is engaging and promoting discussion is better to me than a long winded original content essay. However, I suppose that depends on the community, if Steemit is going to embrace smaller communities as cogs in the bigger wheel, then those communities will end up deciding on their own what is worthy of upvoting and what is not. We are a long way from there, but I can see that as the future of Steemit.
If Steemit wants to embrace the original content aspect of it fully, perhaps its better off being a direct competitor to Disqus rather than social media such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. Have sites embed Steemit as their comment sections, and submit their content directly to Steemit.
This discussion is very interesting. My first post here was about a related topic - a "Steemit button" or "Steemit plugin" that could be implemented as a Wordpress plugin, for example. It would contain an upvote button and a comment section.
The problem is if the authors post all the content of their articles to the Steem blockchain, they will probably get problems with duplicate content. Search engines would ignore their posts on their blogs/websites because Steemit is much more popular.
So inevitably if Steem develops in a more website-agnostic solution (a blockchain based Disqus-Flattr hybrid) at least a part of these authors would post only a part of the content to the Steem blockchain - link, title and meta description, for example. That would not be bad however, it would be a bit more like Reddit, and it very probably would lead also to a more diverse authorship with more diverse topics.
I think diversity in content is GOOD! Anything to get Steemit on that track, I am on board with. I'm just getting bored of seeing thousands of posts about Steemit.
First, nice discussion you two are having.
Well, more or less, having non-original content linked to if it's an honest attempt at showcasing something interesting and not unethical, then I can get behind it. We are surely on the same page with not wanting copy/paste articles with low quality or non-existent comments by the reposter who is just trying to get some cash. Stealing content is also what none of us that really care about the "company culture" here wants.
I think you are right. This is going to be hard to predict. The future is funny like that. We users don't have the final say in how things proceed and some decisions may turn out to be fantastic and others disastrous. We can only wait and see and hope this project can be so lucky as to have these problems in the future.
Cheers