I’m not really going to try and argue with you, because I think we have a fundamentally different view on the situation..
why is it that people go on doing this curation function for free on Facebook and Twitter - and every other free social network before them - and yet for some reason we have to financially incentivize the same behavior on Steem
This is one of the main reasons why Steem is such a different animal. With the distribution of stake that we have, it doesn’t really matter much what most users are doing. What matters (in terms of rewards) is what the large stakeholders do. They are looking at this more from an investment perspective, and what we have found in practice is that the “average” investor does not care about discovering content, and instead are more concerned over ROI.
consider what regular folks want out of a platform
I’m not disagreeing that ease of use is not (also) a major issue. From my perspective though, the ability to earn rewards for their contributions is even bigger of an issue for a large portion of users. It is a problem that I believe is necessary to solve in order for our community to substantially grow.