Steemit has an imminent problem and that is content discovery. There are just too many articles and too few people reading them. The problem is especially with the content discovery for the new authors. Not many people are ready to spend time reading the posts of their friends and followers. It is a tedious job and not rewarding enough. You might find a good post by a friend or a follower. You might upvote it and hope to get some curation points in the process. But how often has this happened if you do not have more than 1000 followers? I am assuming the answer is never. When this happens multiple times people loose out the motivation to spend their energies in curating. Instead they take the easy route : They are constantly looking at the posts by whales so that they can upvote them in the hope of getting some curation rewards.
Turn the tables around
So we will need to turn the tables around and give more rewards for the discovery of content by authors whose average earnings are low. Since whales with large number of followers already get enough votes and rewards, the curation rewards for discovering their content should be reduced. Adding curation rewards for resteeming can solve this problem to a certain extent.
Remember that an upvote doesn't increase the visibility of a post, it only increases the rewards for the author of the post but it doesn't help in making the post reachable to others. If possible we should identify who are having a network effect in making content more popular and reward them accordingly. That will create a level playing field. Irrespective of whether you are a whale or a minnows you will be in the lookout for the good content and resteem them to make sure that it gets the visibility it deserves. Wildspark is already doing this successfully and may be steemit can learn from it.
Steem = Ghost city of China?
If we don't address this problem Steemit will turn out to be like the Ghost cities of China where there are lot of high-end skyscrapers that have no occupancy at all. Just that in steemit there will be lot of users writing posts but not enough people reading them even if they are worthy. I hope Steemit addresses this problem by the earliest :)
What are your thoughts?