RE: Looking for a good Bidbot mathematician
Well, there is an orthogonal means of interaction:
You can write things, post them, and then look around for other people who write things which you enjoy and might be related, engage them in comments, and literally grow your audience by attracting the attention of people who might be interested in what you do.
I can't promise it's profitable, but that part can be fairly emotionally rewarding.
Unfortunately, the real problem has nothing to do with the voting system or the fact that people would like to make money. There are problems with the former and the latter is just to be expected. No, the real problem is that Steemit as a social network is poorly designed, because it's missing a significant and important part of what has made social networks popular over the last decade.
Discovery.
I've written about this before and if you're really curious you can go through some of my previous work, but the short version is that there is no way to silo content, no way to sift through content, and the basic assumption is top-down authoritarian when it comes to how the system values content. What you vote for or I vote for really doesn't matter to what the system presents to us except in vast aggregate, and unless you agree with everyone else on the platform – the things which are surfaced by the platform for you to read are not in accordance with your interests and expressed desires.
Now, it's possible that after the next hardfork when very rudimentary community management systems are going to be put in place that we will see a really solid engagement with creating actual mechanically supported communities, which should make it much easier to find at least some content.
With the absence of a decent discovery mechanism, a reasonable community architecture (even the rough equivalent of sub credits would have been a vast step forward over what we have), or any means for your personal decisions to really impact what the system presents to you for consideration – there is very little left, from an architectural point of view.
If you just treat the platform as a reasonably useful blogging platform which conveniently uses Markdown and provides rudimentary account following mechanisms, and you look to off-site mechanical architectures to define and build your community (like Discord or even Facebook Pages), you can actually make some fairly significant use of Steemit as a social network. But it is essentially incomplete in and of itself.
You're definitely right about discovery being an important part of social networks that Steem does very poorly at. Even those "authoritarian" models give me options that I sometimes do enjoy consuming. I rarely get that feeling dumpster-diving on Steem. Though you can find interesting gems if you search long enough.
I don't really care about making money writing as much as I did in the past. I'm more interested in finding interesting content that satisfies whatever craving I have at the time. Also it's been interesting to see how much this platform has transformed since I first explored it in 2016.
Hopefully communities do reach us sometime in the near future. Like you said, by developing sub-communities it should easier for like-minded individuals to interact more with each other and provide each other with engaging and interesting content. Although, looking at the GitHub pages, it looks like Steemit is really only dedicating one developer to its development and recently reorganized and adopted the agile methodology. Hence the massive delay.
Even if the ship does indeed sink, the platform will still be interesting to use. Witnessing the rise and fall of a social media platform. That'll be something interesting to write about.
Let me be clear about what I mean when I say "authoritarian" model.
On the steem blockchain, the only measure of quality or readability is the accumulated weight of vests which are assigned to an individual piece of work by votes. Like everything else on the platform, it's scaled by the SP of the actor – in this case the voter.
You have complete autonomy when it comes to how you wish to pass around your voting power, which is really just a separate pool scaled by SP and which regenerates at about 2% an hour. But it really doesn't matter what you vote for, because the only thing that matters to the system as a whole is what those who have sufficient SP to make their votes far more valuable have voted on.
This wouldn't be a problem if we were talking about less than two orders of magnitude difference between the average user and the top end, but we're talking about seven or eight orders of magnitude (and often higher) between the average user and the top end. Ultimately, this means that what you and I decide to vote on and reward is not what the platform puts forward as the best content, for us individually or globally. Only a global rating makes a difference to surfacing, and we can see the results of that relatively trivially.
Look at Trending and Hot, and how utterly useless they are for actually discovering good content. Those are the only surfacing mechanisms that Steemit provides.
When I go looking for content on Steemit, it is hard work. There are a limited circle of people whose work I consistently look at, but mainly it comes down to picking a handful of tags which aren't so omnipresent as to be useless and not so rare as to turn up nothing.
Depending on the relatively small number of people that I follow to re-steem content that I'm likely to want to see is also in my quiver, but the content worth looking at is rare enough that even that wider net doesn't always find it.
Thus, on top of those mechanisms, I have to go off-site for tools which actually serve my purpose. Ginabot is the best of the lot because it can consistently watch for certain phrases or tags and immediately let me know when they have been referenced. It's not a community, but Ginabot doesn't sleep and she's always handy.
I've seen a few social media platforms coming go in my day as a side effect of being a tremendous geek and predating the web on the Internet. (I lament the loss of Usenet every day.) There have been enough come and gone that one more really won't make much of a difference to me.
If it does come down to it, however, a postmortem is going to dissect why an obsession with global metrics instead of local/individual ones is an overall mechanical failure.