I've been here long enough now, posted plenty of blogs, tonnes of comments, and spent enough time on the platform to start forming some opinions. You may not agree with all of these, but I am sure you will agree with some, and may have some of your own piss-off's. It's important to voice these concerns, make them public, discuss them, and over time we can improve them. We want SteemIt to grow, we do!, we are all invested in it together, we need to continue with the positives and look to fix the negatives.
You know what really grinds my gears?
1. Self curation is plain wrong.
HF19 was exciting, I got excited, you got excited, it was great...but now that the euphoria is dying down a real flaw is beginning to emerge. If self-voting is profitable, then why would others vote for you, why vote for curation, for posts and comments you like? There is no incentive, which is why we are seeing more and more users especially those with more firepower, mostly self-voting. 
2. Commenting robots/spam.
This is an increasing problem, it's increasing because it is profitable to robo-spam comments, either via just copy/paste or using an actual robot "Hi, great blog, you are really amazing, I followed you, follow-me plz, I f'ing love you".
I admit, I photoshopped that one a bit, but comments like these are all over the place, and if you go look at the users histories they are getting upvotes, earning money on their comments, they are getting paid...which means it won't stop. What can you do? Well first of all please don't vote for them, don't give them an incentive, you can flag if you want. But the problem is more systemic, and we will need a fix that addresses it from the ground up. Should we be keeping a list of the culprits, shaming them publicly, I don't know, but I do know something needs to be done.
3. The incentive system is easily manipulated.
This is a more general complaint, and I don't know what the solution is. I can think of dozens of ways to game this platform, although I am reluctant to say them as I don't want to give ideas to people who would actually use them. Most of them involve multi-accounting or 'colluding' with friends, some of which is against ToS but that isn't going to stop many people. If you are willing to be unscrupulous you can earn a lot of money on here, which is a problem, there is no real mechanism to get rid of bad behaviour. Sure you can flag users posts and comments, but that only takes you so far, and what stops them from dumping their Steem to a fresh account and starting over? Also...flags use vote power? And what about a bunch of people deciding to flag someone just to screw them over....sigh...
4. Quality content isn't (usually) upvoted, whales are upvoted.
Go look at the trending section, now go look at the hot section...almost all the posts are written by high rep/high steem accounts, yeah...whales! I realize this is sort of the point, and I don't begrudge whales all the glory and Steem they have, after all, we all aspire to be rich one day as well. And...much of this content is very very good, don't get me wrong. But what does grind my gears is some of the terrible content that does really really well, the way the voting system is set-up people pile-on, even if they shouldn't, ie. if a whale already voted other whales should almost be avoiding that post as their curation will be severely diminished. If you have a vote worth $10+ you can probably post anything and do very well on it, you could start a series about poo, just take a picture of a poo everyday and post it in #photography #poo and you will do well, in fact, you could probably post the same image every day and still do fine. Where is the incentive to post interesting content if you make just as much posting poo?
all images sourced from Pixabay
Thanks for reading my complaints. Disagree? Agree? Have more complaints to add to the list? I want to hear from you, let's make SteemIt better together! I have lots of positive takeways as well, but we'll save those for next time. Cheers
