I'm quite new here but this is what I can gather is important: curation, commenting, and community. My opinion is that if one of these things are lacking it actually is pointless. This doesn't apply to just steemit, but any social media platform.

One thing that steemit has right is that you can't "dislike" content, a concept that is outdated and unnecessary to determine whether something is worthy of views. I guess by following people you can create a feed to bypass a lot of the stuff you don't want to see.