I have been critical in the past about the lack of innovative interfaces on the Steem blockchain being used to present information in unique and interesting ways. Unfortunately, rather than tackle this issue, most applications simply adopt the page filters that are already found on the blockchain. Those being "trending", "hot", "active", and "new". I'm not really sure what active does, but "new" is a stream of spam and "trending" and "hot" show posts that make money fast and posts that make a lot of money. Unfortunately, those properties do not make content good.

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<h5>Steemit's Fire Hose Approach To Content Presentation</h5>
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In terms of information presentation, Steemit is dominated by sites like Reddit which has elegant and simple solutions to content presentation. One Account, one vote and sub-communities that develop around individual subreddits. Pretty basic stuff and vastly superior to Steemit, in my humble opinion, in terms of ease of finding interesting, quality content.

But my goal is not to advertise Reddit's superior content, but explore why the current applications are so broken in the ways they present information to the audience. Certainly, we have to admit that they are doing some things right in order to gain the massive following and popularity among large numbers of people.

With traditional media platforms, each individual audience member is treated equally. Each person has a voice and their vote can impact how much attention a video or article receives. With Steem, this is not true. The audience is now filled with individuals with varying influence depending on their stake in the ecosystem. Those with more money have more influence.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong about this statement. In fact, many will argue that this attracts more investment into the ecosystem. The issue comes when that influence is used to determine the validity or value of a certain piece of information. You then have a huge bias to the interest of large stakeholders and you can largely disregard the opinions of smaller stakeholders to some extent.

Thus, the front page "trending" and "hot" pages represent the content that large stakeholders find interesting, not the content that the community or sub-groups within the community find interesting. Essentially, the opinion of the rich is the only opinion that really matters since articles are organized simply by the amount of stakeholder support that backs them.

So, that's why a lot of these pages are littered with uninteresting content. Because the content is only interesting to the whale who self-upvoted it or the user that spend a ton of money buying bot votes. But there is no decentralized opinion or consensus on the content itself. These pages are simply additional "promotion" pages.

And all of these additional applications have adopted this poor system of information presentation to the users. The end result are cheap looking websites with inferior content, not necessarily because the content available is mediocre, but the good stuff is hidden behind the garbage that whales push up to the top.

Now I'm not saying the whales are really at fault here, but they aren't professional curators of art either. And not only that. If someone wants to organize the information better they either have to develop their own application or spend a ton of money on Steem. And that's frankly not appealing.

Users should not be expected to buy more Steem in order to be able to access more of the content they like. They should only buy more in order to facilitating earning more. 

I'm not going to lie that I spend a good amount of time on other sites that have more interesting information. They've had years to figure this out. Unfortunately, applications haven't figured out that interesting content, not money, is what gave these other platforms their meteoric rises and mass adoption. 

Sure, content creators and advertisers make large sums of money off of YouTube videos, but the site garnered popularity when no money and expectation for money were on anyone's mind. The ability to access interesting information is addictive and keeps people coming back for more and inviting their friends for the ride.

I'm not inviting anyone to the cesspool that is Steemit. That's not to say there are not some nuggets of gold out there, but they are hidden beneath an ocean of mediocrity that is simply there by a poorly designed interfaces. There is complete disregard for the majority of the audience in order for the few to flaunt their garbage on "trending".

But, I enjoy posting here. I enjoy only reaching a few eyeballs than many. It makes things more manageable and I can spend the time talking to interesting people. Most people are not content with such a grind and would rather use other platforms in spite of the rewards. Just think about that. The interface is so bad that some users quit and convert to other platforms. User retention is more important than total accounts created.

But, complaining is a waste of time unless you are willing to propose solutions and I have proposed lots of ideas over the months on different fixes and adjustments I would like to see. I have also developed alternative experimental ways of showing information like Q-Filter which attempts to solve this problem. I have also given away lots of SBD in the previous posts in order to foster better discussion and show that it is possible to not have one's soul completely corrupted for money's sake.

But that's enough about me. Let's hear what you have to say. What do you think Steemit's biggest issue is? How would you prefer to see information portrayed? This is the last post in which I will be giving away 100% of the SBD of the post and I have to thank the now over 500 (probably 20) followers that occasionally take the time to read what I have to say. Thank you.
 
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[Image](https://pixabay.com/en/pollution-trash-degradation-1603644/)