Wrote about this spiral a while back and got forced to delete it since the person I called out was an incredibly powerful person on this site. The buying of power, votes, and friendship is leading to censorship, a centralization of power and ultimately a limit on the content created on this site. I was a huge supporter of this project early on when I joined and for this very reason its sad to see it go downhill. When you can "sell" votes for nothing and make free money, while creating free money, there is a problem. People buy followers for free and then create wealth for those followers in return for support.... and I'm not necessarily criticzing this aspect, but as you said above, there are different versions of Steem and this is not my version.