Why Steemit isn't the Killer App.... YET

Face it, most people are here because they are getting paid for votes and curating posts. We're all whale-hunting, like Internet Age Ahabs hunting Moby Dicks like @dan and @ned. 

This poses a problem. As long as most of the SteemPower is held by early adopters, the posts that get rewarded are those that conform most to their particular worldview. This has a few consequences:

• Posts in any other language than English have a very small chance of earning a decent reward. 
• Posts about steemit, how steemit made people rich, how steemit will change the world, etc. are rewarded relatively more than other posts.
• People who are interested in writing about other things will lose interest, as their well thought-out posts are not rewarded and they see MakeUp Vids getting 10s of 1000s of SteemDollars.
• What you get is a filter bubble/circlejerk-situation. Some people will try to play along for some time and some of them might be succesfull, but user retention will drop. 

In the long term, this has some serious negative consequences for the community, including the whales (unless this was all part of the plan, and they are cashing out as we speak). The value of a currency is based on the trust people place in it AND the amount of people using it. As users lose interest when their posts aren't noticed, the price of Steem will go down over time and we are back at square one. Of course it isn't as black and white as I state here, but this seems to be the trend from where I stand. 

So now what?

What would be a healthy development for steemit? I think it would be good if SteemPower were to be divided more evenly, we need an ecosystem that has more ranks than minnows, dolphins and whales. 

• One idea could be that not using your SteemPower to vote/curate and not writing posts would actually cost you something. Kind of like a negative interest. This will give a big boost to liquidity. 
• Another idea might be that the reward for a post can be inversely related to the difference in SteemPower. When a whale votes on a post of some minnow, the reward will be big. When a whale votes on a post of another whale, rewards will be smaller. This will elevate more people to the level of dolphins, as the trending topics will be from the up-and-comers instead of the usual suspects. 
• There might be some technical advances that will improve things. Right now, steemit is a site for curated content. It isn't, like many assert, a social network. There is nothing social about it, as there are no network links binding people together. In other words: we haven't unlocked the value of social ties, something that makes Facebook billions of dollars. When someone would be rewarded SteemPower/Dollars for bringing people together, or for bringing more people to Steemit, we will see a rise in value. 
• Similarly, when there will be a feed of the people you are 'friends' with, this will tie the bounds of people and instead of a collection of people, we let people make connections, increasing user retention. 

I think Steemit either has to evolve into something more democratic or it will be taken over by the next big thing, which will value the content and connections that new users will bring and the time they put in.