I’m not here for a long time so I’m not aware of the developments since the beginning of this platform. But I do have some experience with social media and “paid” blogging platforms…
It’s my experience that as soon money is involved you will have an increase of #shitposts and #shitusers and… on this platform, bots. All in the hope to gain some easy and quick money. But there is no such thing as easy and quick money, at least not for the majority of users… so they will go away after some time. Of course, they will be replaced by others… who will go away too… and so on, and so on…
But I also do believe that there is a “niche” where users that are interested in real content will stay. Of course those are also interested in the money-part, otherwise they would not be here.(let’s be honest, the interface of steemit right now is not that fabulous 😄)
So, in my opinion, if you carefully select who to follow… your high quality people platform can exist.