My cat is cute - why this is a serious concern

Well, first of all, you be the judge:

I lied! I have two awesome cute cats, the white one though is an old lady suffering from a feline form of alzheimers (being the neurology geek I am I confirmed this myself - checked her alpha channel amplitude with an EEG and compared to a young healthy cat - confirmed what we all suspected already from her symptoms of forgetfulness and distress - poor thing often walks into a room and sits there meowing at the wall).

With that out of the way (this is the internet you see), let's talk about why on earth this is a serious concern:

Those who hang out on slack know precisely why, but it boils down to what steem wants to be.
Do we want steem to be a place where people make detailed insightful blog posts only?
Do we want to be a new reddit?
A new facebook?
A new twitter?

The problem is, there are massive disincentives here against casual posts of the kind that humanise social networking - people mock twitter for the "here's my cute cat" and "I just had an awesome lunch" type posts, but these little things are I believe a large part of what makes social media sites successful.

On my twitter account I follow quite a few celebrities and they randomly tweet about little things that make them just more human and this connects them to fans much more.

On my old facebook account (I deleted it for personal reasons - please do not ask) I had many posts talking about all sorts of minor trivial things, as did a lot of my friends on there. Then there were the more "practical" type posts too - as a musician i'd often organise jam nights by dropping a message on a friend's facebook wall asking if they were up for a jam.

Were it not for these small minor things, I believe facebook and twitter would be far less successful.

So what can we do to get a large portion of the "normal" social media users here?

My solution.......

drumroll

Reward surrender

I believe the best way to handle this is to enable posts that the poster surrenders rewards on, the normal interface on steemit need not show these posts, but they'd still be on the blockchain.

This way a "steembook" type site could be built, linking together the worlds of casual social media posts about awesome lunches and cute cats with the reward-driven serious blog posts of steemit.

What do you think oh reader?

Is my cat awesome and cute?
Is there a need for posts about how cute my cat is?
Is there life on mars?

[edit]
I've posted a github issue about this:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/469

Anyone more familiar with the steemd codebase, please help out by producing a patch