I think that's a bit unfair. The idea that a niche social community would be primarily interested in the things that are unique about their own social community is not exactly a condemnation. Conceptually, a social network that pays people for generating highly-upvoted content is an interesting one, I think. It may turn out to be a disaster, but there's something there IMO. What it'll take to really find out is some degree of mainstream usage. Right now it's all crypto nerds using it and trying to P&D cryptos, but it isn't fair to take that as evidence that the idea is flawed. That's just the nature of the community at the moment.
They're interested in their network getting big so they can make money. There's not much nuance to it. You can spin it another way but read the thread. It's a soulless money grab, and it's disappointing because they actually have decent software.
Once you've built a core community that is first and foremost interested in ICOs and cryptocurrencies, how do you get out of that?
Anybody who has STEEM benefits from increasing the network effect, not just him silly. Bitcoin and Ethereum has the exact same incentive to do so.
The idea is to create thousands of micro community who have their own ideas of where their communities wants to go. They can use their own tokens with their own economics if they happen to not agree with:
1. The inflation rate
2. The curation reward curve
3. The initial distribution
I have a friend over there who's participated since its inception.
A lot of what you see over there now are schemes that essentially involve paying people to upvote content. At first, I was surprised they allowed people to bribe others to vote. But, when you think about it, that's exactly what the site itself is doing (bribing people to participate).
And, bribing people to upvote is not exactly the best way to encourage good organic content. I tell my friend the model is unsustainable in its current form, as it destroys the value it's trying to create. Worse, that value is what it's trying to redeem to entice more people to participate. So, it'll inevitably run out of gas (they apparently jump-started things by subsidizing initial posts, which sparked early excitement, but payouts sharply declined thereafter).
Some might argue that it democratizes content production, but the value creation effect is not the same as paying a smaller set of producers for valuable content that a larger set would consume.
So, instead, it's more like a perfect case study in tragedy of the commons.
