Steemit is very much not a game, but a social media platform marketed with claims that content creators and curators are paid for their contributions, but largely failing to actually perform as claimed, or at least as anticipated. It can be gamed, just as any system of rules can, but that doesn't make it a game.
Rewards on Steemit are almost completely captured by a tiny group that dominate Steemit's economy.
Government is merely an agreement. You govern yourself at all times, even if you are threatened or coerced to undertake actions you don't want to. Steemit is a form of government, and can be much more than it is.
Steemit is only beginning to explore how it can evolve, but is controlled by a small group that has the financial power to crush opposition through downvotes. This group also controls the rewards attainable by content providers through it's financial dominance applied via certain tricks which permit gaming the system.
This dramatically limits the potential of Steemit to succeed at market. While the plutocrats largely oppose fairness in distribution of rewards (as this maximizes the benefits their dominance secures in the short term), the vast majority of people are very sensitive to fairness, and strongly support it. Even other species react to unfairness with actions designed to rectify the problem.
In the short term, since Steemit is the only player in it's space (social media cryptos), it's marketing will continue to draw in users that create an apparently valuable platform with their work and content. As they discover the plutocratic methods used to govern Steemit, they react in a couple different ways.
Usually people will try to rectify the problem, some by pandering. People are a social species, and pandering is strongly selected for because it cements groups. In political units where competition with opposing groups results in war, pandering and plutocracy is quite powerful.
In such an environment as Steemit, where a small group has almost complete financial control of the economy, a gross divergence in power between a ruling group and a subservient group is likely to form. However, the power imbalance between the slaves and the masters almost inevitably leads to abuse of the slaves, and therefore there is also a strong selection against pandering, that creates a third group. This group is usually not much of a group at all, since it is comprised of essentially independent individuals, and so tends to not focus the whole power of the group in concerted effort.
This last population comprises the vast majority of people, but may have the least power of the groups extant due to it's incoherent nature. Systems that complement the strengths of this group and minimize the weaknesses of relatively independent individuals can easily outcompete systems that stabilize a master/slave dynamic, because the independents are far more creative, and strongly motivated to oppose the repressive systems.
Given the nascent developmental state of social media, blockchain, and neopolitical organization, and the dissatisfaction of a significant percentage of the population with extant platforms, an explosion of competing platforms resulting in a plethora of sites that implement different features and mixes of these technologies, is about to begin.
If Steemit isn't perceived as fair, the vast majority of people will reject it in favor of those platforms as are. Steemit, however, has the advantage of being the first in it's market, and if it is designed properly, can maintain that advantage for the long haul. A rejection of the current political system is necessary for that to happen.
From the present number of dissatisfied minnows, and even dolphins and whales, due to the perceived unfairness of Steemit, the large number of solidity programmers exposed to the platform, and the potential of a platform to radically alter the paradigms of the most powerful social forces on a global scale, it is almost impossible that competitors aren't currently in development.
Since Steemit is not a geopolitical unit physical warfare is not an environmental feature pertaining to it, and since that feature supplies most of the power of plutocratic/slave societies, the vast majority of political models potentially forthcoming as platforms will overwhelmingly outcompete it, as almost any conceivable competitor is more fair.
So, the future is coming. If Steemit does not fix this problem in 2017, the wealth, that is concentrated in the hands of the few on Steemit, will be reinvested before such competition becomes apparent (in order to preserve it before the price of Steem crashes), or dissipate as the platform dies when abandoned by users moving to new platforms providing the benefits Steemit promised, but failed to provide.
Some things Steemit can try, to resolve this opportunity so as to optimize the adoption of Steemit in the market, are eliminating the downvote, causing a downvote to negatively impact the voter proportionately, or by an equal amount. Each of these models may radically alter curation, and author rewards, and in different ways.
Delinking personal wealth from rewards is far more potentiating of a system that is fair in providing rewards for work on Steemit. This also eliminates the need for the tricks that make gaming Steemit for profit possible, such as strategies to time votes to maximize financial impact, choosing content to vote based on popularity and potential emuneration, and etc. These changes make diversity of content, duration of content relevance, and relevance of content selection in curation, better able to improve content development on Steemit, as well as increase fairness.
In a system that links curation and author rewards to the reward pool only, delimiting the power modulation by number of votes also would be possible, permitting people to engage more deeply and beneficially in curation, which also potentially improves the value of the content, and Steemit itself, ultimately.
Together, changes along these lines would dramatically modify Steemit politically, from highly repressive financially, to egalitarian. Since adoption is limited by this factor, improving the perceived fairness of the platform's rewards mechanisms would be likely to drive higher adoption rates, and reduce turnover.
Furthermore, as the rewards increased in distribution and size, content would improve in quality, as reward size reflected more the value of the content over it's gamability, and quantity. All of these improvements to Steemit will increase the price of Steem, and provide significant gains for investors in Steem.
