Youtube is one of the most congested and crowed platforms there is, due to the sheer amount of content being posts every day.
AN HOUR OF CONTENT IS UPLOADED EVERY SECOND
Due to this congestion, it is extremely difficult for your post to get awareness of any sort unless a big youtuber comes along and shouts you out. Ask any youtuber, they'll tell you it's very very hard to gain any traction at first.
Why is steemit like this?
The amount of content being uploaded to steemit every second is on par if not greater than youtube ALREADY, proportionally based on users. This is because so many people keep dumping out posts, trying to make it big and earn $10k over night.
Why is this the case on both youtube and steemit?
Unlike reddit, both of these platforms offer a form of compensation for your work. This only drives the competitiveness between users higher.
Why is steemit not like reddit?
On reddit it doesn't matter if you have 0 karma or 100k karma, YOU ALWAYS START OUT THE SAME PLAYING FIELD EVERY SINGLE POST. You don't get to jump ahead in upvotes or the front page just because you have a lot of karma. If this were the case reddit would have been dead A VERY, VERY LONG TIME AGO.
Why is this BAD?
Another way reddit and steemit are similar is in the way that users that have grown the most, youtubers with millions of subscribers or steemit users with 100's of million vests and tons of steempower control the platform. This highly decreases the ability for innovation, new users to grow, and good content in general. This is because a post CAN NOT become popular with out the help from big users or "whales". We already have an extremely poor distribution of power and the platform has only be out a short time.
What can steemit do to fix this?
I'm really not sure, but I know something needs to be done for this platform to survive. Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas in the comments section.