I've only been a member of the steemit community for a few days and I've already noticed a big issue: curation. There are a few problems that make curation difficult, and without guidance this is going to remain a problem.

1. Plagarism

This morning one of the new posts in introduceyourself is a blatant copy of a wikihow article. Even the images in the article have been copied over. What makes it worse is that it's a poor copy, with formatting mistakes in various places.

I think there's value in posting content on steemit, especially as steemit doesn't support posting links like on platforms such as Reddit. The question in when has the OP overstepped the mark? Do they need to prove that they are the original author, for example?

2. Spam bots

Steemers can earn by voting and commenting on posts, and the sooner it's done, the more they can earn. This has resulted in bots automatically upvoting and commenting on posts. I'm looking at you @sharon and @ciao:

By upvoting automatically the post isn't being given merit for its quality and contribution to the community, but being used as a springboard for rewards. This will only contribute to lowering the quality of what we see on Steemit.

3. Ghost profiles

We've all seen them. Several photos of a beautiful woman who is lonely and wants to be your friend. In many cases the English is terrible, but it's OK because she wants to learn and you can be that special someone to help.

Oh, and the post is already at > $3,000 in rewards

This is frustrating to see because there are Steemers out there writing great content which is being hidden by fake posts. What makes it worse is that upvoting seems to be a lot more obvious that downvoting (which is actually flagging and located in the upper right corner away from the upvote button). I also think Spam bots are contributing to this.

There seems to be an unofficial verification system where the OP posts a photo with some paper and a date, but that seems really easy to fake. I'm not sure what the point is.

4. Cross-posting

The tag system is a bizarre. A post can be given many tags. The first tag is the main tag that you see when you view the post, but the article will appear in the post list of every single tag.

And the result?

Posts are being put in all the popular tags just to get coverage. Perhaps they apply loosely, but it feels wrong. Take the plagarised post from the first section about introducing yourself. In my opinion, this does not belong in introduceyourself because the OP isn't introducing themselves. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it would be nice to discuss it.

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What curators need

Flagging (downvoting) content only gets you so far. I think the following is needed to ensure a high quality experience on steemit:

1. Guidelines

Guidelines allow the community to keep an eye one one another. They not only help ensure that quality posts are published on the platform, but also help prevent and handle abuse. Stack Overflow has some excellent guidelines that are crystal clear on what is allowed and what isn't. Everyone who has used the platform is familiar with the following:

2. Power to remove

At the moment it doesn't appear that much is done about flagged content. I've noticed it disappears or perhaps moves down in my listing, and comments turn grey (which is actually weird to look at), but other than that the posts or comments seem to stick around, continuing to benefit the OP.

Perhaps a badge style system is required so that those with a certain amount of STEEM power can remove posts and comments. The problem here is that many accounts have power because they've abused the platform, so it might take more than this.

In any case, curators need more power to deal with the issues so they don't languish on the site and hide the great content provided by genuine Steemers.

3. A way to discuss the future of Steem

Much like StackOverflow's meta board, Steem needs a place to discuss the future of the platform and the communities involvement. Having to write posts like this risks it being sent into a void and never being seen by those that need to see it. I'm looking at Whales like @dan, @ned and @smooth here.

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Update: 6 hours after publishing this post has now entered the void.