I still think it's a shame that so many people are engaging with vote buying and selling.

It seems like as long as the reward curve encourage buying+selling votes, there's not much hope of the curation energy going where it should go: to actually reward valuable content, content that helps to add to steem's momentum and energy.

We should have break-out "Steem Stars" the same way we have YouTube stars -- people who reach millions, who then inspire others to start their own steem blogs.

But right now the reward mechanism is in the way of that, because on the front page of Steemit you still don't see anything worth emulating. It's a lot inside baseball or awkward content that can't generate momentum on its own, propped up by vote buying.

People try to get votes in order to get attention -- it should be the other way around.

We're getting close, because a lot of people regularly share content on steem to talk about their lives. But the infrastructure is somehow not helping steem's content creators to iterate and improve on content -- most channels seem to stagnate before reaching an audience outside of steem.