Steemit needs curation tools – without question. But think about what those curation tools would actually be and what problems they would actually solve?

You want tools to help you find good content to up vote. So does the average user, looking for things which are relevant to their interests.

You want tools to make voting much less a hands-on affair, to help you use your voting power efficiently. So does the average user, maybe even more so than a devoted curator, because they assume that in doing so they'll be a better member of the community.

You want the ability to find other people who want to curate the same way? So does the average user; we call those "communities," and Steemit has done a crappy job of actually providing that kind of functionality for anyone to use.

It strikes me that everything that a "good curator" could make use of, the average user would also get extreme satisfaction from. They are all just things which would make the user experience on the platform far superior.

There are times that I wish I had an off-site "bot" which would manage my voting for me. All I'd need to do is hand it my votes as I want to do them and if we are in the vote window, it would simply delay until about the 20 minute mark before voting (and have I mentioned how much I hate this whole voting window concept?), And would simply sit on the rest of my votes until just before the end of the payout window for any particular article and vote at a percentage such that all of my votes on either side stay at a consistent voting level. It will know how many votes I had made in the previous 24 hours and it will know how many votes I have to make in the next 24 hours. This should just be a basic bit of math.

Maybe an advanced bit of math. But calculable.

That alone would go a long way toward making voting less of a nightmare operation and probably make curation a lot easier to deal with, so that you could just go find content that was good and vote for it, and let the machine worry about setting percentages and values.

Discovery itself is a whole different problem. I've written several articles on that and I have talked to some folks about various lexicographic and semantic relationship construction systems to try and build corpora of interesting and useful content in order to simply be able to say "I want more stuff like this" and have a chance of getting it. It's nontrivial. Possible, but nontrivial.

There's work to be done, there.

Essentially, the platform needs tools that make using it pleasurable. It is not a lot of fun to use Steemit. Or at least – to use Steemit as a serious part of your social media day. Some of the content is fun, but the platform itself almost goes out of its way to get in the way of that fun.

External tools can help with that, but I suspect that a lot of people are hanging back, waiting to see what happens with the new hardfork – and that wait is not doing any good for the platform as a whole.

I don't know what to tell you. It is what it is.