Money corrupts. The problem is whales are not only not participating as much as they should, but Minnows are also not supporting other Minnows. There is this mentality on Steemit that it's every man and woman for themselves, when the Steemit whitepaper refers to the concept as a community.

There are some issues that need to be solved before Steemit and other sites grow in users:

• Better ways of dealing with spam
• Incentivise whales and other larger users to participate more. It's so easy once you hit a certain level to just profit off of your own upvotes (a flaw in my opinion)
• Better ways to discover content
• Make it easier to signup, it's a bit complicated at the moment and should be way easier
• More emphasis needs to be placed on communities, allow curation groups and the like to create communities where they can support quality writers (content portals and collectives in the form of micro communities)
• Make it harder for whales to abuse their flags
• Introduce penalties for falsely flagging or brigading content that doesn't deserve it
• Disallow being able to self upvote your own comments or make it pay almost nothing so people stop abusing it
• An algorithmic natural trending algorithm that is harder to game