5 years from now when we log in to Steemit, what will we see? Will it be a flourishing social media site with vibrant communities sharing knowledge? Will it be flooded with corporate money as a new engament strategy for businesses? Will it be MySpace, all but dead save for a few niche followers? All I know is it will make a very interesting case study some day.
Steemit's overall philosophy is endemic to much of the crypto-sphere, decentralization, decentralization, decentralization. They provide a framework, the rest of the world runs with it. I think for the most part, that framework is pretty brilliant. Everyday a set of stake is handed out more or less based on how many shares you have on the platform (Steem Power). You vote on how to distribute that pool based on what you think is deserving.
Opinions on the Framework
SBDs being pegged to $1 is an underrated choice that I don't think is fully appreciated. One of the biggest problems with crypto and its adoption as an actual currency is the instability of its value. It gives a secondary token for paying for goods and services on the platform, and you can choose to pay yourself some of your earnings rather than have to sacrifice stake to do so. I know a lot of us are enjoying the additional rewards we are getting from the SBDs. However, it's sort of nonsensical that at this point we're just getting paid in two separate tokens for no real reason. A lot of that $ that is inflating SBDs SHOULD in theory be raising the price of Steem instead. I keep waiting for the bottom to fall out on SBDs and they go back to the peg, but irrationality in crypto speculation is strong.
Delegation is also pretty brilliant. Again, I look at SP like shares in a company. Yeah a lot of people seem to abuse the delegation system, but if people want to earn passive income on their shares it's their right to sell it. It also is useful for people who want to lend influence so certain projects. Overall, I think it helps a lot more than it hurts.
Curation is where I think there is some room for improvement. I like that 25% of the reward pool goes to curators to reward them for discovering content. I dislike that curation rewards as essentially non-existent when you don't have SP, and the 30 minute cool down. I get that it's in-place mostly due to auto-voting, but it also means that if I want to boost something fresh off the presses I'm not going to get a reward. But also the only way to get a real reward on curation when you're a minnow is to vote on it early. Reputation should also be a factor in how curation works and that might prevent some of the voting issues that we have currently. Additionally there needs to be a separate pool for flags. We need to be better able to police what is posted, right now there is a strong disincentive to flag because it diminishes your ability to reward. Negative curation is as important as positive curation and it needs to be treated as such, I'll get to why in a second.
How it plays out
So we've established the strengths and weaknesses of the framework. Let's discuss why this will work or not work. The biggest problem right now on Steemit is the whale war against Haejin and other whales who abuse the system to gain rewards for mostly useless posts. These actors are frankly bad for the ecosystem as a whole. They acquired power and are using it solely in their self-interest. This is emblematic of the collective action problem that exists in large decentralized systems. Everyone in the system would be better off working together, but because self-interested actors can benefit more by taking advantage, we are all stuck protecting our interests and not cooperating and as a result all of us are worse off. See despite what conservative thought will tell you, we are not better off left to our own devices to build ourselves up on our own. In fact, cooperation is the optimal strategy provided cheaters are significantly punished. That caveat though is why Haejin and those like him thrive here. It's also why corporations continue to cheat. Once you have acquired enough power, the rewards of cheating are greater than the punishment, so it's the optimal strategy for you to employ. We have a disincentive to flag, and so we don't punish those who act in a self-interested manner, and in the end we all suffer.
There's either two outcomes here. Those who grind the reward pool for easy gains cash them out while those interested in building this place reinvest in the system until they control enough shares to reign them in, or the whole thing degrades until we all migrate to a different platform with better governance. As I've written about before in my defense of government the only way for the common man to gain enough power to gain influence equal to or greater than individuals with great power is organization. To that end, what you see on Steemit currently is something akin to the Gilded Age. In the absence of governmental control, various projects or gilds have popped up to allow people to organize to support each other in what can be a very lonely ecosystem for the average plankton, or to help prevent them from being crushed by the whales. I'm going to take a moment to shoutout the projects I've involved myself with or just those I think are doing great things to support the community overall. 
I would personally prefer organic vote curation, but I also don't have a problem with bidbots and vote buying. In fact, I sell my vote on SmartSteem. Why do I do this? Because at the end of the day I am running a small business here. I have an asset, Steem Power, that I own and can utilize for passive income. Anyone who knows anything about personal finance knows the way to really gain wealth is to use assets to generate a passive income stream. I also know that the more SP I can acquire (all of my SBDs either get converted to SP or used to promote my posts) the more influence I gain, and the more I can shape Steemit as I want it to be. I believe it's more beneficial to invest 10% of your income to later act philanthropically when you can do more good, than just give 10% of your income away to charity. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will do much more to support the developing world than 100,000 of us sending $20 a month to some children's aid charity. However, I invest ethically (I only sell my vote to white-listed parties) and only use vote buying where profitable (and generally that support good projects where I can). I prefer to use a strategy that will have more benefit in the long run than to trade that for short-term gains. I am investing now because at the platform grows it will be harder and harder to gain influence solely by writing on here. A lot of SP sits there unused currently and as more of it goes to a wider base, we will have to work even harder to keep our influence ahead of inflation.
Where do we end up?
So to recap, Steemit can be the platform that a lot of us envision, but to get there we all have to organize and do what we must to gain the influence to shape it as we see fit. Those who act out of self-interest do not care about anything other than maximizing their take. So too must we act in a collective self-interest to out-compete them. Is this the best framework for this sort of ecosystem? Frankly probably not. Those who do well here are those who are willing to put the work in to seek out the guilds and establish a presence. In some ways that barrier to entry is a good thing, but if this is ever going to get mass adoption life has got to get easier for the unsupported newbie because most won't stick it out. Hell I've tried to get people into the platform who I think could do really well here, but lost interest while waiting a week for an account. Some of us are cool building a business here. Most of population though doesn't have the inclination or the time. Some competitor is going to come out eventually that drops some of the decentralization and openness for a system with more mass appeal, and then it will come down to which one can produce a better product. I think in Steemit's current state, it's hard to see it win. And so, again, if we want this to work out and protect the time and money we have invested here, we must all work together to make this place as outstanding as it could be.