I was having a conversation with 
and I think I came across an important idea. I'm going to refine this some later, but for now, I want to simply get it posted to discuss it with others.
I don't know if I'm an optimist, but I'm trying to understand what Steemit is about. As it is, people just seem to post lots of random "stuff" most of which is low quality. If this is all that Steemit is, then it might as well not exist. (I don't like reading most of what is on this site.) However, if we pay for curation, possibly collection, and at some point start hiding the garbage, we could have some very nice content.
I'm imagining Steemit kind of like the room full of monkeys and a typewriter that given enough time will produce Shakespeare.
In the case of Steemit, we (sort of) have a means to train the monkeys. We also have slightly more talented monkeys that are trained to curate content. Lastly, we have developers and possibly machine learning tools, that will develop algorithms to clean up some of the mess left by letting the monkeys bang on the typewriter.
Is that optimistic? Maybe? Perhaps delusional. :)
I should mention that my research is in the use of machine learning and informatics methods to study materials science and engineering. I take low quality, busy, noisy, messy data and use algorithms to find order and understanding. From my perspective, there are likely some real gems that can be refined from this mess of content.
What I've realized, is that this is the future.
There is no way to fairly censor the contribution to say that, "Unless you're educated enough, or connected enough, you're not allowed to contribute." That model is gone, and we're better off for it. However, as a result we have places such as Steemit that are full of low quality content. Most of what's posted here the world would be better off without. (For heavens sake, there are people whose entire existence is about writing posts to encourage others to post.)
How do we find content in the noise? Machine learning and data informatics. I don't know exactly how this is going to work yet, I think that we need algorithms that have a better understanding of language, but ultimately, we'll need some algorithm to extract the creative and original ideas from the noise.
To explain a little, in my research mostly I have noise, but the algorithms are able to find the hidden patterns and the underlying meaning. When I was learning these methods I used the grade book for the course I was teaching. I messed up the data and filled it with noise, but the algorithms were still able to accurately classify the students according to the grade they should receive.
So from my perspective all the superficial stuff that happens here, the plagiarized content, the fluff posts, the upvote bot posts, is not a problem. OK, it is a problem in the short term, but in the long term it isn't. Most of this is going to go away and be refined. The Steemit users, and curators, and admins are data producers -- some of it is useful, most of it isn't, but from this steeming pile of data we'll produce gems.
This is just a short post to stimulate conversation. Thoughts?