Thanks for the well thought out comment! First, let me start at the end :) I 100% agree that Curie could and should do a better job of the most basic part of explaining its mission - making it transparent what, in fact, just happened when a post gets the big upvote! The Curie voting stakeholders have already voted to make an automated comment, very short and sweet, without shilling or selling anything, to explain that the post was found through human curation and upvoted after human review as exceptional content (and referring to the Discord channel and our whitepaper to learn more). So, that is in the works.

The lack of engagement and feedback that you are mentioning in the first portions are definite problems with Steem - and this is the problem that all of the communities which I mentioned in my post have sprung up to solve. You pretty much have to engage in an off-blockchain community (usually based on Discord but I guess some people must still use steem.chat LOL) to actually generate real interaction on your posting. Unless you have a large sum of money to invest in which case people will be more than happy to be your friend ;) So, in my post above, I did not mean to imply that the communities here do not have value. They do. My advice to you if you want to stick it out here and actually generate real interaction on your posting, is you are going to have to find and join one of the many communities here. That could be one of the writing communities (writers block / isle of write), MSP, or whatever. It takes a time commitment and a willingness to hang out in a chat server. If you make that commitment, a Discord community will absolutely read your posting and offer you feedback and fill in these cracks that are actually gaping crevasses if you only stay on the blockchain proper.