When I was first told about this site, the person told me that the dev's of steemit were concerned with making the world a better place by helping early adopters/innovators find community and resources. He had high hopes that the steemit platform/ community would enable innovators that have done well to help others that are struggling to get their ideas and inventions out there. I had doubts because through years of research and experience, I've seen that whenever money is involved with something, the crap and psychos rise to the top but I signed up anyway.
Because I'm not a person that's motivated by money, I figured that I'd be a black sheep here regardless of the quality of my ideas or the posts describing them, and guess what? I was right. A few of my posts got a few views and comments before being buried under drivel.
I was really hoping to find an open minded, forward thinking community here but the very nature of the platform does exactly what western industrial civilization does, create loads of crap and empower psychopaths.
So you and I both are wanting these psychopaths to sift through the crap, and despite their total lack of empathy, find "needy" people to be charitable to. Sadly, I think we're on the wrong platform.
I think that when I find a more permanent place to camp, and a better internet connection, that I'm going to attempt to start a movement to use the open source code to make a similar platform that actually has the intention of making the world a better place.
The first thing that will need to happen is removing "anyone can make fast easy money" from the equation. Maybe a user will need to get a minimum level of upvotes and verify themselves and their projects before being able to receive money. Maybe the currency will be setup to only be used within the network, banning it from being sold for fiat or other alt coins, essentially creating a merit based sharing economy within the network. People wanting to participate could pay a small membership fee and these funds could be used to cover costs. Leftovers could be split amongst the members of the site based upon their reputation. We could sell ads to community approved charitable projects as well.
The second idea, necessary to increase the amount of exposure to posts, would be to instigate a site wide post timer where the site can only take one post every 15 minutes. This wouldn't work for the pyramid scheme side of things but since gambling isn't the motivation, I don't think it would be an issue. This way, each user will have some chance of getting through the majority of posts in a day without having to spend hours scrolling through crap.
The other thing I'd want to implement would be a better tagging system, something that sorts tags into categories and limits posts to only a few tags, preventing the tag abuse that's ruined the chances of finding anything good on steemit.
I saw the potential for this platform in the beginning and realized that with the power that the whales have, if they stuck to their make the word a better place ideals, that steemit really could have made a dent, but as soon as I started participating, the problems with that idea became glaringly obvious. Their wish to grow the platform by any means just diluted the pool to the point that it's too nasty for me to keep attempting to swim in.