It's no secret that Steemit is structured more or less like Reddit. It's a blog / forum full of tons of different sub-topics where people can make posts, comment on those posts, and discuss whatever they want to discuss. Unfortunately, it is also no secret that Reddit has a much, much larger userbase than Steemit does. It often has higher post quality, as well as more fruitful, authentic discussions and interactions. Why is this so?
The main issue for me is that, unlike Steemit in its current design, Reddit is inherently a meritocracy. On Reddit, people vote for things solely because they like the post, whereas Steemit votes are usually made with the intention of profiting off of the vote. On Steemit, people vote for themselves, their proxies, and for posts they anticipate will lead to a high curation reward. I do not blame them for doing so-- they are incentivized to do this because of the reward structure and the limited voting power. However, this system has the unintended result of making post-quality and intellectual discussion an afterthought. If the safest route is to autovote reliable sources of curation rewards, then there is little voting power left over to give to the posts we authentically appreciate. Because of this, there is less incentive to make quality, entertaining posts, and few people really take the time to peruse Steemit for their own entertainment. People just beginning on Steemit don't have much of an opportunity to receive upvotes other than the obvious "introduce yourself" posts. When they discover this, they give up rather quickly, and without quality content to keep their attention, they have no reason to stay.
If Steemit is going to grow, much less survive, I think it needs to find a way to make curation rewards have a closer relationship with post quality. One thing they could do, hypothetically, is allow an additional "upvote/ downvote button," just like Reddit's, that would be anonymous, have no power restrictions, and allow people to democratically give their opinion on any number of posts without fear of being punished for downvoting (by BernieSanders and other whales). You could make these free votes have a partial influence on post reward/ curation reward for the monetized votes.
Doing this would give people an additional incentive to peruse posts and vote on quality instead of the expectation of curation reward. It would level the playing field against those profiles which always end up on the front page thanks to whale and bot votes, since they would also need "authentic" votes to get their full post reward. It could also give a better opportunity to new users, since they wouldn't need big vote charity to get them followers and attention on their posts. I don't know... it's probably not a perfect fix, but I think to make this platform successful we need to add an altruistic, entertainment based element. As long as it is used only as a profit-making game, I think it will be impossible to grow.