When you have bots that will vote en-masse someone's feed of interesting articles into oblivion, that is how you destroy a platform long term. Instead of letting a thousand flowers grow, the bot mob votes it down when clearer the real people who started following found my stream of articles I read and posted useful.
Well, this is why bitcoin will win - I mined from July 2010 through the end of 2012 and thought steem might be a useful platform going forward and have a lot left - bitcoin is un-censorable in the long term.
However when bots control the discourse, it is doomed to failure long term.
edit: Even the bots vote down this. Amazingly short-sighted.