I am very glad to see this post. I'm new, and I fully admit to being one of the people easily discouraged by the issues with the platform. It's definitely hard to find motivation to write posts when nothing gets seen--the best moment I've had here so far was someone who decided to actively look for newbie introductions dropping me a $6 upvote. It seemed a little bit promising for about a day.

Since comments can also be upvoted, I decided for a while to move to a strategy of mostly just commenting, but even finding things that are worthwhile to comment on has been a challenge. I thought I could treat the payment aspect as purely a nice bonus, since in the past I've certainly contributed a lot to things like forum discussions without any promise of financial gain, just because the conversation topic was interesting. But this platform, at least with the way it's currently set up, makes that sort of community interaction difficult. I've gotten discouraged and walked away from the site for days or weeks at a time because I logged on and found not much of interest to even read, much less meaningfully comment on.

I think you've brought up some very good points here, which are probably very workable, and I wish you the best of luck in getting some of it implemented. I would absolutely love for this to be a platform that's worth spending the time to write quality work for.