No system is perfect. No social organization is perfect. No system of compensation/rewards is perfect. It comes down to choosing to engage what you believe are the best systems/organizations given the options. I could bitch about SteemIt (and I have), but show me something better at this point in time. I'm willing to continue to post my hard work up to SteemIt because the platform (in what it aims to accomplish) is aligned with my ideals, my values. In practice, sure, it hasn't achieved its vision yet (it is still in beta). But I'm going to hitch my wagon here and keep an eye on SteemIt's evolution because the potential for paradigm shift coming from this platform is huge.
That is like saying you go to some guy offering to pay you to do some work. You do way more work then he does but when you are done the guy who did less work got more pay because he has a influential uncle who made that possible.
Nobody is asking me to do anything. Nobody is expecting anything from me either. There have been no contracts, arrangements or prices established as compensation for whatever I decide to do here. I'm in no work-sharing arrangements with anyone as all of my work is mine (and verifiable). Everything I'm doing is of my own volition and I know the time risk and potential benefits. I'm showing up because I want to show up. Your analogy is a little weak. I don't say this to be a jerk, I'm sure there is a better analogy to be made to highlight the shortcomings of the platform in its current state.
SteemIt is not perfect, it has it's fair share of problems. I'm hopeful for improvements as these are early days. I sort of feel like I'm repeating myself here.
There is plenty to critique here on SteemIt and I applaud those people who keep pushing for improvement. I myself hope I am one of those folks seeding change as I roam around here. best-
But you are in a work sharing arrangement whether you realize it or not. Everyday the value of steem is different but what remains the same is this fact: 10% of the rewards pool goes to witnesses, 15% goes to the owners, that leaves 75% left over which 25% gets divided among curators and 50% goes to authors. So if a author slaps up a meme he takes 75% cut from the left over rewards pool after everybody above is mentioned above is paid off. That 75% varies according to the price of steem and how much his post made. Now if he does this three or four times a day or more each time he takes 75% more from the pool. Lets say he does four post a day, two really good post that he put a lot of effort into and two that he did that didn't amount to any type of quality effort at all. Basically he just took his hand and pulled out a big wade of money from the cookie jar for nothing, that same cookie jar that determines what your 25% stake will be based on after what's left ....now your return for your comments is a lot less, not only that but YOUR 75% stake in a post you spent six hours on is also now worth a lot less because he made two additional worthless post that drained an 150% based on what those two post made more out of the pool. AND in most instances it's not even that people voted that money to him it's that he voted that money to himself by self upvoting. What's even sadder is in this case is that he, unlike thousands of others on here, was given his voting power...he didn't have to earn it....then to show his gratitude for the gift he has been given he turns around and uses it to post poor quality stuff like a meme just to pull more money easily out of the pot that everyone has to share from. Now if he had taken that meme the other day and wrote something about how it could be seen as breaking a glass ceiling so to speak that would have been different but evidently that was way to hard of work for the hundred(s) bucks he got.
As far as saying no one makes you do anything I've seen people flagged and keep getting flagged for just running around the system up voting. They don't put effort into reading people's post and most say a small sentence then up vote. Somewhere wherever on here who tracks these things notices this person making money curating but not contributing, checks it out and starts flagging them. Once you get someone running around flagging you you might as well consider it a ban unless you start being productive in a more constructive manner.
Ok to your first point, I guess we just have perception differences with respect to the relationship we think we are in.
I disagree with you that, if say I was in charge of things, I would code into the system different percentages, some different posting rules, etc. SteemIt has plenty of issues. Any software company that I've worked for in the past always has issues with their products, especially when they are in early stages. The entirety of crypto is nascent tech, a social/blogging network atop a crypto economy makes the whole experiment even more cutting edge/nascent/new. Plenty of bugs to work out. We should all continue to bitch, complain, raise awareness. Hopefully the devs and bigs are paying attention (they certainly have incentive to do so!) and working as diligently as they can to improve the platform. I'm hopeful that progress will be made. And in the meantime, I'm doing my best to focus on the best points of steemit...the legit community building that is going on, the excellent curation projects (curie, ocd, etc), the whales that are pretty clear-eyed about the issues and actively playing a positive role to make things better. So, we'll see...improvements will come along and the platform will steadily improve, or, maybe it will shake itself apart. I'm hoping for and putting my energy (and doing my best to be patient) to the former because I think SteemIt has the potential to be something great.