RE: 3 reasons steemit won't make it out of this decade...
yep absolutely.
I think you're right that someone could just wonder on the site from a google search and that's cool. There is some good content on here and one of steemit's biggest assets is that it makes people, who would not otherwise create content, give it a go and that's fantastic! I think that most of its issues could get cleaned up, if the people with most say choose to do so.
Regarding changes, some ideas for change would be...
1 - Change the disincentive of the downvote if you comment material that people don't agree with / like. This would allow for more "real world" commenting, where people could say things without being scared of being downvoted. How to do this - that's a big topic but just a couple of ideas would be to either change the underlying downvoting rules to be less in favor of the big palyers or create some sort of judicial higher power account or jury that could penalise people for downvoting based on simple disagreement.
2 - maybe do something like not allow upvotes unless you're actually on the post url. at the moment I can scan through steemit.com/created and just upvote posts without even clicking on them!
Regarding the ponzi scheme element, maybe in the long run, if the platform has the right incentives in place to generate a great environment for producing, sharing and consuming content, then I think the demand for steem could be justified from advertising money flowing onto the platform.
That's just a couple for now cos I'm in the middle of something... but let's keep discussing
Both points seem very valid. Especially the 2nd I find interesting. Would there be a way in creating some barrier to upvoting in which a standard of reading/understanding has been established? What If we could let Steemit randomly post blogs in between blogs of every user, containing a somewhat random std title and picture so people wouldn't notice it was a 'fake blogpost'. Every upvote on that post, which contains a warning of not upvoting as it is a quality test of upvotes, will severely punish the upvoters. That way, blatant upvoters such not even reading the blog could be somewhat incentivized to actually click on the post and somewhat read them. The idea can be polished, but the raw concept doesn't seem to bad right?