It's interesting to compare and contrast Steemit (admittedly a very young community) with other similar "user-created content" platforms.
Everybody uses Facebook (or can safely be assumed to). It has managed such a powerful network effect that it became hard to avoid. I have it in low esteem but in order to reach certain people I use it from time to time to post articles that are rather out of place in such frivolous company, alongside beach and cat photos. I have friends who use FB regularly to post reflections and insights and political commentary that deserve better than intellectually stimulating his friends for a very brief period of time and then feeding Facebook's algorithms. It looks like a waste of my friends' brain power.
Another one I use regularly is Quora which is unashamedly intellectual: ask question, get answers (of varying quality), no ads (that I noticed) and everything is free. I don't quite understand the business model but I don't care that much - it's a place where I can read thoughtful answers (although stupid ones cannot always be avoided) to sometimes insightful questions. When I've tried to understand better the model behind it, some people advanced the hypothesis that Quora is building a high-quality answer database (probably to sell ahead to other companies or feed machine-learning, God knows). The "quality selection" mechanism can only be based on "upvotes" (because there's nothing else). The implicit assumption is that the more upvotes an answer has, the better its quality. The problem with this hypothesis is that "you cannot vote for the truth": if Quora had existed during the Dark Ages and someone had asked "What shape is the Earth?", the most "upvoted" answer on the "Medieval Quora" would have no doubt been "The Earth is flat".
Steemit has the potential to upend the tea table and claim the crown in this area of "user-created content" platforms. "How?", is a question for another day.