I found your blog when I checked out who gave me a nice upvote, and that led me to read your post from yesterday. You address many of my concerns exactly. I'm fairly new to Steemit, and like the concept of a decentralized and uncensored community. I also worked hard for my first 100+ posts and felt like I was getting nowhere fast. I looked at how Steemians with a wider following and higher returns on their posts did it, and almost every single one was buying upvotes from bots. I've started to do this, and it is leading to far more genuine uproots, readers, comments, and followers. I think that's just what it takes at this point in time. I like many of your ideas, especially the ones about limiting or devaluing delegated SP. Forcing, or at least incentivizing us to do our own curation would go a long way to rewarding quality content. Another idea would be to make it less valuable to upvote your own content than to "give away" the uproots. Not sure of how this would look, maybe limit to one self-upvote a day, or make self-upvote only 25% as much return, or some better idea someone more intimate with the finances of Steemit than me thinks through. Anyway, overall I think you are on the right track. Hopefully someone in a position of power sees your ideas and takes some of them to heart. Followed and upvoted. Thanks.