As I read the white paper on Steemit, a couple of questions popped into my mind and I cannot seem to wrap the idea around my head.

According to the white paper,

Steem is designed from the ground up to address the major barriers to adoption and monetization of a social media based economy. Our thesis is that the same techniques used to grow major social media platforms can be used to bootstrap a successful cryptocurrency. Economic incentives enabled by cryptocurrency can dramatically facilitate the growth of a new social media platform. It is the synergy between cryptocurrency and social media that we believe may give Steem a powerful advantage in the market.

What exactly is the business model of Steemit? Does Steemit intent to sell advertising space on the platform in the near future?

In a perfect world, community members would cooperate to rate each other's contribution and derive a fair compensation. In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.

Aren't the creation of @randowhale and @minnowsupport, albeit well-intentioned, already causing people to abuse the system?

There are other forms of contribution that Steem recognizes and rewards using objective metrics. Among these are: transaction validation, proof of work mining, liquidity rewards, and reporting of misbehaving block producers.

Steemit aims to be a self-regulating platform. What are the criteria for "flagging" misbehaving block producers? What are the incentives of liquidity providers since Steem is not a currency that is recognized for the purchase of goods and services?

Steem wants to build a community that is mostly owned and entirely controlled by those with a long-term perspective.

Is there a roadmap to Steem's vision? And what are the future milestones that Steem hope to achieve? How does Steem determine profitability in its business?

SP balances are non-transferrable and non-divisible except via the automatically recurring conversion requests. This means that SP cannot be easily traded on cryptocurrency exchanges.

If SP is illiquid that wouldn't it incentivize people holding large amount of SP to vote for themselves in order to get the more liquid SBD to cash out?

By paying those who are elected, Steem creates market competition to earn the right to produce feeds. The more the feed producers are paid the more they have to lose by publishing false information.

Currently, who are the ones providing the price feed and what is the compensation structure for such service?

As a newbie to Steemit, I'm interested understanding how the platform works and if it will be sustainable in the long term. I would sincerely appreciate it if there are other Steemians who might point out the answers to my questions.