Sort:  

I doubt that, I mean I see potential but it seems the same as any other social medial platform, like facebook or twitter where you have to pay for your content to be recognised.
I am not a fan of this.

Yeah, I'm not sure there can ever be a way to make no person able to get an advantage in what is seen. Whether it is the amount their vote is worth or how popular they are as a person, some metric will make some people flocked to more than others and those others will always be distraught.

The alternative is sort of forcing everyone to view everyone's content, which doesn't even really make any sense. Keep in mind that this is a SATURATED site, with repeated information, the same stories by different people, etc. and whether something is even a 'good' article or valuable at all is Always going to be subjective, so I'm not sure it can ever be escaped that gaining an advantage will be the only way to be the MOST successful.

You have two options to get recognized quick:

  1. Pay to have a high upvote so that people want to read and upvote you and interact with you in hopes of you reciprocating/paying them.
  2. Create content that is so far above others that it can't be ignored. Some groundbreaking idea, or some new product that interests people, etc.

There really will never be another option to get recognized quick (you can grind and grind away with reasonable content and build up a following more slowly of course) and I'm not sure if there even should be.

SMTs though will at least create more upward mobility, but it will still all come down to whether or not your idea for an SMT is valuable and people want to invest steem.

I was not ready to pay the bots for upvotes, and so maybe I could not gather a large fan following. I know that there are only two ways, by which you can gain popularity but there should be something else that keeps people engaged here.
Steem was supposed to be a social media platform, but is now being limited to a mere blogging site.

The DIFFERENCE for Steem from Facebook, Twitter, etc. is that people can give you money with their MINDS rather than their wallet because the upvote doesn't technically cost anything and even with a very small amount of steem, those upvotes can add up, the platform is decentralized, it is censorship resistant, and soon Smart Contracts in the form of SMTs, creating a new level of flexibility on the blockchain, will allow for additional functionality that has yet to be thought of or implememted. Additionally, user data is not kept and sold by the steem blockchain; it is transparent through the blockchain explorer. Those are my thoughts on the matter anyway. :)

The fact that user data is not not stored, which means that nobody can steal it, makes Steem exceptional. Cambridge Data Scandal, is not a thing of the past, if you know what I mean.
I agree with what you just said.