Steemit's Existential Problems

Hi Steemit,

I just wanted to share a few thoughts about how Steemit can be improved as I really like this platform and want to see it grow, but it does have to grow.

We all know that old saying "A shark must keep moving forward or it dies", well that is us.

Systemic problems with Steemit and possible solutions.

Whales have too much power.
There is a definitive pattern to what posts consistently make the top trending pages. A whale's self vote alone gives a massive financial boost to their own daily posts. This in of itself is not a problem, but there is far too much power in the hands of a few. Now I am not expecting to become an overnight millionaire on Steemit, far from it, but there needs to be some kind of limitation on whale power.

two rules
@steemcleaners has told me that I am not allowed to put my referral code at the bottom of my post, ok fine, but more powerful users can.
@craig-grant is linking to Bitconnect
@trevonjb is linking to a poker site and pumping his Genesis code
Now I am not hating on these guys, fair go to them, in fact we should all be able to use our codes without getting a hard time or flagged. However the fact that the admin team lets these guys do what they want while regularly shutting down low power members is massively unfair.

buy in to have power
Outside of being miraculusly adopted by a whale you really need to buy in if you want to have any hope of getting big curation rewards. While Facebook may not pay you, it also doesn't require you to buy in!

good content not rewarded - rubbish content is
@bookingteam.com is constantly gaming the system. Not to say that their content is not useful, but the fact that the same ten users are always the first to upvote their posts and get them into the trending page stinks. Meanwhile people not gaming the system spend hours crafting awesome articles and get very little reward, and I am not talking about myself here but lots of other users who make really great stuff. This seems to be a deep flaw with the voting capabilities system in general. Why does the limit for voting power adjustment have to be 500SP?

zealots
I have seen a lot of abuse of the flag function and downvote function. People are way to quick to attack others if they don't agree, which kind of sucks.

multiple account users
Even after informing @steemcleaners about users who obviously have and use more than one account they don't really seem to care, meanwhile these users continue to game the system. This needs to be stopped.

No direct messaging</>
Seriously, why not?

A better profile page would go a long way
The about section is woefully lacking. We need a few more dynamic tools to personalise our pages.

HTML
Seriously can we get a fix so that we can easily edit our text with out having to type out code every time? It is too 1990's which I know in a way is the charm of Steemit, but if this is to ever go next level then upgrades are needed here to make it more user-friendly.

Steemit owes you nothing so shut up or get out
I have literally seen this posted before. Steemit has in a way become anti-free speech(see flagging and downvoting above). While I agree Steemit doesn't owe me any financial or other rewards this platform will never survive without a consistent approach to rules and regulations.

In summary this platform has such amazing potential but the team running it need to get their shit together and do some serious upgrades. I hope to keep using steemit for a long time, but we will never create a user base with such an unfair system and absent dev team.

I hope we can improve our community.

Comments and suggestions welcome

thanks to tariganter.wordpress.com for the image