I personally don't want Steemit to degenerate into a place where it's merely rehashing YouTube videos. The devs made it clear that we should be trying to promote original content and that people should choose to give upvotes to those posts that have taken more time to create as a reward, rather than merely taking others content and saying "Hey take a look at this! It's cool don't ya think?" then getting paid handsomely for it.

"Please, share any external content you would like, just make sure you are legally allowed to share your content and that you give credit where credit is due!"

This should be the bare minimum if one is going to repost others work, but this isn't being done as much as it should. Barely being done is more like it. So, obviously I agree with your statement there, just I feel that reposting things in order to get a payday for literally 1 minute of "work" is bad for the culture I think the site is trying to promote. Hopefully, the system will change to balance the content so that this experiment doesn't die out due to a flood or an attempted flood of unoriginal popular content created on other websites.

As it stands, trying to wade through new posts is silly. So much junk trying to emulate what people think is the easiest payday instead of just creating. Why should we even bother to create anything unique when you could spam 20 YouTube and Vimeo videos in the same amount of time? Actually, you could "create" 50 reposts in the time it would take to create one really good, well researched original post.

Maybe I'm just being too idealistic or self-centered in that I WANT to create and be a part of something special for Steemit, just I'm not sure it makes sense to do so.