I am pretty certain, everyone, young or old, has either read an article about steemit abuse/steemit user growth and/or thought about it. I have seen a few posts lately on this from @steevc - #nobidbot tag or #adoptaminnow strategy, and then i saw an article today from @paulag that talked about how low steem prices are actually good to weed the crap out of steemit. If you also go through the comments of these posts, you will see varied opinions from steemit heavyweigts.

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Important to first discuss, is what puts people, new to steemit such as me, off and what is abuse? Now, different people may have different views about what they consider abuse but i think its safe to say that ultimately is boils down to fair distribution of the steemit reward pool.

Now, lately, i experienced the force of a certain Mr. H on steemit, who is famous and infamous for the same thing - famous for making money and infamous for making disproportionately more money. His strategy is self upvotes. Then there are others like this post below, that don't make a lot of money but deserve 0 payout for 0 effort -

https://steemit.com/life/@robinson18/heyy-steemian

So to me, defining abuse is simply linked to 2 factors - effort and reward and steemit needs effort adjusted rewards, like risk adjusted returns in finance.

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I don't have a suggestion on how to code the above. May be get a numerical score based on number of words, no plagiarism, no downvotes (in case the post is just random words put together) and then have 50% payout based on that and 50% based on upvotes. Not sure if anything can be done to change the way rewards are distributed but may be if one is talking about one account/one vote, then one can talk about a better reward system than a copy of democracy, because lets face it, democracy isn't perfect.

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Attracting users to steemit isnt a problem. Whether one creates content, or interacts, everyone's 2 cents is worth the 2 cents (may be more) so attracting users to steemit isn't a problem. There is a winning formula in place. Improve the UI and user seduction will improve dramatically.

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Problems that new users face, and what impacts user rerention is, finding an audience or not knowing what to do when one first joins. Most new users come with the idea of making money. Steemit also isnt big enough yet that it can be selective in terms of getting quality bloggers in and not worry about others. It is still a closed platform. Most of the audience for most bloggers are other steemians. Therefore the site needs to benefit both content creators and upvoters.

For a curator who has recently joined, the trending page us useless. The posts are too old for the new curator to make any money and the original poster has little interest in educating/interacting with new users. New users also lack the steemit 'etiquette' to not ask for upvotes. But who is telling them what they should be doing instead? The answer is no one. I have seen plenty of people complaining about spam comment makers but i have not seen anyone educating these rep 25 guys (that could also be because of me following too few people or having been on steemit for a small time, so no one should feel offended).

Next are new content creators. Bullet point suggestions here -

1. New users should immediately be assigned a mentor of sorts that they can ask questions, as stupid as they may be.
2. Bid bots are a problem, they are not profitable, as i have read in other posts and they allow people to be lazy and compromise on quality. They encourage new users to go that route.
3. I like the idea of #nobidbots section - credit to @steevc
4. Steemcleaners needs to be improved, or may be not. I reported 3 articles to @steemcleaners today. Now i dont know whether they will consider what i suggested as spam or not but there needs to be faster, better way to judge this in case of 0 effort articles. Will a post from people compiling 10 such articles a day help? I see lots of people posting crypto news articles daily (also spam posts). So how about a post with spam posts. Over time, the process can be fine tuned anyway.

Sorry, last bullet point was more than a bullet point.

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So yeah, that's what a red fish like me thinks. May be problems faced by new users are best described by new users themselves. Let me know what you guys think - do i make sense? Are my suggestions worthy of your 2 cents?