I love Steemit as a platform and I've been an active member now for four-and-a-half months. But I am not going to sugar coat it, it has been incredibly hard and I still am not at the point where I wish I was. I know if I withdrew some cash from the bank and bought Steem, I could take a shortcut and buy myself voting power to get to the top quicker.

The biggest concerns I have about the Steem platform are @ned and his cohorts have made no efforts to make this platform a less hostile and unbalanced place.

The biggest improvements they could make to this platform are:

• Incentivise whales with profitable upvotes to start upvoting content more often. At the moment there is no incentive for a whale to use their voting power to vote up anyone else's content, it's more profitable for a whale to self-upvote and climb the power rankings.
• Incentivise flagging. Why should flagging cost you precious voting power and penalise you? We need to reward flagging because at the moment it's a flawed system. All flags are public and you open yourself up to retribution from higher ranked Steemians who want to get revenge for being flagged.
• Penalise users who abuse/misuse the flagging system, especially in instances where the flags are not valid. Following StackOverflow's flagging system, they should go into a queue where they are independently verified by other random Steemit users and the result is achieved by consensus.
• Deincentivise self-upvoting. This one seems so damn obvious, halve the number of rewards you get from self-upvoting your own posts on Steem. Why should you earn the same amount of money from upvoting your content and others content? Seems contradictory to Steem being a social platform. Coupled with incentivising upvoting other content a little more, it would mean whales would find it more profitable to spread the wealth than keep it for themselves.

This is all I can think of now, but things need to change and Steemit Inc have thus far made no efforts or gestures towards the community to signal they will improve things. I am excited for SMT's, but they're not going to fix the platform.

Words are not enough. The community has very little power/ability to make change on Steem than they think, ultimately it's Steemit Inc who has to/can only fix things.