I think there is most definitely room for improvement with the platform in terms of giving more visibility to minnows who are joining Steemit in the hope of making some money.
First of all I would like to start of by mentioning something important in that, I think we all have to gain some respect on this platform which comes in form of consistently churning out quality post after quality post, as well as commenting on other people's posts, which will in turn gain you more followers and more upvotes, pushing your reputation score upwards.
Idea
An idea that I've had ever since joining was a way of showing a filter, which would allow you to show posts only created by authors ranging from reputation score 25 to 40 or 50 to 65 or whatever you may want to search for.
The reason for this is simply to improve the visibility for the many new, and of course interesting people who are joining us on this amazing platform every day, but who are struggling to get noticed and more importantly may get de-motivated and move away from the platform.
I can only see this as being an issue moving forward, with the fact that as soon as you create and submit a post, it may only be on the 'new' page for a minute or so, before it's pushed down the page into oblivion and with some of the more popular tags, it will make this even more difficult in future.
By having a filter, this would allow minnows who have just created a post to have their posts stay in the eye of many for longer instead of being pushed down the list, for only but a handful of views.
It would also keep these users engaging with more people and thus creating more followers for them which of course, increases the chances of more upvotes which mean more money.
Popular Minnows
Imagine if we had a filter where we could see 'hot' and 'trending' tabs where the most popular and usually more respected authors are more likely to be found, but with this filter, people under a certain reputation score would be separated from the people who may be considered whales. It would help with finding more talented authors out there, and also help keep people attached to the platform.
Of course this would just be a filter option that you would need to select, as this would be completely unfair to whales, who have put in many, many hours into the platform and contributed a lot more than most, be it with investing their own money or the countless hours of writing fantastic posts for us all.
The platform is still young and I can see many more experimental phases and more hard forks in the future, but it's better to do it now than when there are millions of users on Steemit, because in the next year or so, we probably will hit our first millionth user.