What you are proposing is basically "Quora on steroids" or "Stackoverflow on steroids". Those communities are built on top of this type of question <-> answer dynamic. Based on their evolution so far, I can only speculate that this idea will work on top of Steemit too.

But.

There is a but.

It will be different than the Steemit we know now. If anything, it will be a spin-off on a vertical niche.

It also solves only one part of the problem: the one about people already knowing what they're looking for. But there are a ton of other potential readers that they don't know specifically what they're looking for, or their definition of what they're looking for is more fuzzy (looking for humor, entertainment, motivation, education, etc). These readers have to be served somehow.

My first proposal will be based on the "long-tail" content. Right now, you get rewards on Steemit only on 2 time levels: the first 24 hours and then the next 4 weeks (please correct me if I'm wrong). But there's a lot of evergreen content that may be consumed over many months or years . I have posts written in 2009 that are still getting 70-80 unique users each and every day. That may seem very little, but over a month it adds up to 2-3000.

This first proposal will be to extend the amount of time over which you can get rewards. Maybe for ever. That will encourage writers to submit more evergreen content instead of "news-like" bits that gets obsolete in a few hours. And that will attract, in time, more readers that will contribute value.

My second proposal will be related to content discovery. If you consistently vote articles which are tagged "business" make the platform offer you more business related content. That will increase affinity and will solve the problem of users not knowing what they're looking for.

And the third proposal will be related to affiliates. I know the functionality is already built into platform. You can append "&r=username" to any link from Steemit and if somebody signs up using that link, it will be counted as a referral for you. I don't know if there is any other stuff going on with these affiliates at the moment, but I suspect it isn't. My proposal will be to link a part of the new steemit supply "printed" in the market to the number of active referred users. In other words, the more active referrers you have (I will define "active" in a second) the more Steem you get. An account who drives in more people should have more Steem, for the entire lifetime in the platform of the people he /she drives in. "Active" means somebody who is constantly voting and commenting on articles on a ratio of at least 20:1 (20 votes for 1 comment) in a given timeframe (let's say a week).

Let me know your thoughts on these.

Thank you.