As a software developer brainwashed in the Agile ideology and one who often worships incremental progress and reads the Scrum Guide before going to bed, it comes as a surprise that such a group of innovative people can miss the target by such a large margin even when evidence of group hitting the target exists. If you are developing a product that is to be introduced to the consumer space, what is the most important element there? Perhaps ... the customer.
This is a landfill
Now I get it... consumers of content aren't as attractive as new investors, but investors don't care about the product. They care about the return on the investment. If we're really focused on making a product that we expect more people to use, then we have to cater to those people.
You could then argue that Steem is for the creator. A clever pivot and a nice try, but the creator merely has a part to play in the product. The creator doesn't use the product, they are the generators of potential product. The product is content, not access.
Steem is not r/place or the Million Dollar Homepage. Access was the product there, but the access was very scarce. Real estate isn't scarce here and scarcity of write access was never the proposition. Blocks will continue to be mined and content will be continued to be created, so the product is content.
That makes the target of the content, the content consumer. People that you get them hooked to the product long enough they want to join the network. Then the network becomes a little more valuable as creators now have people they can interact with, the network is now delivering a service or good to some user (without needing the prospect of money printing to prop the whole thing up), and investors are happy because their investment in a product is finally showing more promise than a pyramid scheme.
So, why the picture of the landfill? I heard a lot of preaching of Steem needing just that one killer app before we'd be riding the unicorn galloping on a rainbow to the moon. Well, here's one: Clean the shit.
Build an interface that filters basically everything but a few hand-selected posts you think people would pay money to consume. Guess what... that's not an easy problem to solve, but who ever said the killer app would be easy. Let's stop overwhelming the end consumer with garbage and cover that shit up with a nice attractive landfill.
Is that contra to the Steem ideology? Who knows... I am just a software engineer that builds software for a living that has to fulfill specific requirements in order to meet minimal goals in order for the product I am developing to even be viable. I clearly know nothing about what works and what doesn't. But those Silicon Valley assholes do. And their echoes may have inspired part of this post... Maybe.