I completely agree with you and that is definitely an issue here. When you say, "while the masses get poo pooed because they are not "talented" enough or smart enough" - this is the exact issue that killed tsu. You could not participate if you could not make good content.

So how do those people ever improve if they pay for votes? How does that make steemit look to the outside world? It's true that "good" is a judgement call, but crap is crap.

I've read comment threads here where people complain about not getting enough bang for the amount they paid for the bot - then other people answer, "It's because your content is bad so no one else votes for it." Other people just take the $2 and are happy and produce more bad posts. Either way - the popularity contest was rigged.

This is why fb has groups - so you can get content you need without the boobs (and butts). Those two win anywhere and so are not the issue. Using the nsfw setting works here for that. I have it turned on and I have not seen anything get through that bothered me.

What I'm talking about is trying to get new content creators who want to post here and be active. Apparently that is what steemit needs and what posts I have read ask for - more subject matter content away from crypto and memes etc.

It's hard to ask an established content creator to post here when there is so much effort required, and little chance to succeed against the meme-like stuff. They will stay where they are and steemit will stay its little tiny subculture and not grow.

Steemit needs those creators to keep growing. There is a finite number of people who do great cat memes and now its time to expand beyond that. By paying for traffic, those 4X a day meme people will never change. No one would vote for a large percentage of what is in the bots if it was not promoted by bots. How often do you see a "great" meme that you want to show your freinds?

Somehow - steemit - small as it is - has managed to succeed in the search engines, moz raking, alexa ranking etc. I think it is because of the amazing interaction here. The ranking draws people like me with content because we have it and we want to put it out there in a place that ranks.

Right now there is a huge learning curve and bots support people who pay regardless of quality. Anything can rank through payment - making some tags here pretty spammy.

Right now if I were to ask anyone to join steemit, I I would tell them to ignore the steemit crowd and just post their content for the search engines. But that's not going to work either, since the steemit rank goes into making the search engine rank. You have to have the steemit crowd on your side to do well here, even though they are small.

I'm posting in the yunk tag because I thought it was a cute idea and I have photos for it and I knew people were looking. It's meme-y and completely out of my norm. I'm only doing it for steemit cred and because I feel like I can do it.

I pat myself on the back to say my posts are good and they do get attention. That tag is not being promoted to by bots and it is pretty funny and garbage-free as a whole. I search through it and I like it. It will be interesting to see what happens if a lot of posts get promoted to yunk that are not so good. Hopefully not, but already people use it as a secondary tag with no yunk reference at all so we'll see.