This is the brutal honesty steemit needs right now, Thank you for compiling all of my similarly held grievances about the platform in one concentrated rant. Its seems @ned is to busy dreaming about out SMTs to focus efforts on making this site functional...
If Steemit really wants to be the next Reddit and an uncensored haven of the crypto future someone will have to come up with a way so that like reddit, the best content that rises to the top reguardless of how much SP that post has behind it. It could be most resteems, most likes, views, what ever but most payout is obviously not working.
Having good content is the only way the posts on the front pages of Steemit can compete with the many other avenues of the internet and the new payment based systems in the future.
Right now the only thing Steemit has have going for is the money aspect which is basically a trickle-down economy. And that is not something I can easily recommend to people who should be making money for their work, the brillant creative people who would add value to Steemit.
Untill this place is reimagined they will spend their time elsewhere on more lucrative ventures.
Thanks I believe it is necessary now also.
It's true that going for subcoins was not the next logical step with all the issues. Beta usually means they are ironing things out not adding more crap that may not work.
You are right, highest payout is not the way to sort the pages at all. This really should have been obvious in the get go. Funny thing is that it was never really stated that it was being sorted that way. Those of us that know that had to figure it out on our own or be told that by someone who did figure it out on their own. Honestly that seems a little shady to me. Myself, along with many others have actually done tests to see just how you get into hot and trending tabs because it is all cloak and dagger lol.
I can say with utter certainty that if I was told that 5 months ago (how it was sorted) I probably would not have signed up. That would have been a real red flag for me. Now I'm sort of stuck here lol. I'm invested in the platform in many ways so it is hard to leave. Plus the curiosity of seeing where it is going keeps me here.
As far as the money aspect goes it is really getting watered down. High posts when I joined were $1500+ now it is like $180+. That is not much time to have fallen so drastically and much of that seemed to be overnight.
I was hoping to launch a writing presence from this platform and like you state it fell instead of growing. My time would have been better spent holed up writing then scraping together a publisher.
For some reason I still hold faith that it will either become something or that someone else will build something much better soon.