RE: A seismic shift in the competitive landscape
Emphasis on curation rewards as "finders fees", which aren't available for Twitter "likes".
With the current distribution of coins, the curation rewards that someone gets tends to be mostly a function of their own Steem Power. The original vision of curation rewards was for surfacing viral content with the expectation that highly-rewarded posts would have accumulated rewards from upvotes from lots of different people, but in practice it doesn't work that way. Right now the bulk of curation rewards feed back to whichever big voter caused a post to have non-negligible rewards.
Emphasis on decentralization, censorship resistance, and (nearly) irrevocable ownership of content.
I think the hard fork that retaliated against the Hive people cast a big shadow over that.
To some degree, what we have today is a hybrid of DPOS + proof of stake (maldirected social rewards). It'll never be perfect, but there's definitely opportunity for improvement.
Two ways to improve it... Better voting from top-tier stakeholders, (I hate to say it, but including downvotes); or a better algorithm. I prefer the second, but either could offer improvement. Unfortunately, I don't know how we persuade the people who think they're benefitting from the current arrangement, but maybe this will get their attention.
It did. And so did the day we all woke up and learned that Tron's stake had been frozen in a back-room deal. I was thinking that when I typed it.
But, it's still a valid point. On Twitter, people have to "apply" for monetization.
On Steem, even the content that was "censored" is still out there, if someone wants to make the effort to retrieve it.
On Steem, it's even possible for one of those "censored" accounts to set up their own node and collect rewards. (I have actually wondered if that might be happening, and how we would know.)
Personally I am skeptical that the chain can pull out of being a DeFi chain with a social media cover story at this point, since the powers that be show little interest in changing the status quo. But if change was possible it would probably help if there was an effort to establish some social norms around what was acceptable in terms of self-voting (I think it should be disapproved of, like on most normie social media), and establishing that delegating to someone else and getting upvotes based on your delegating is self-voting-by-proxy and therefore frowned upon. I think there is room for some automated upvoting along the lines of basic income, but there should be some norms about what's reasonable (maybe based on some sort of function of a global poverty-line metric?). Historically it seems like most of the efforts around establishing voting norms on the chain have been done in an "enforcement first" manner which ends up looking like bullying to the people on the receiving end. If people could be talked in to a better model first they might be inclined to accept some changes.
Yes, in the original conflict I thought that Steem and Justin Sun had the moral high ground and a group of witnesses not acting independently but conspiring behind closed doors to freeze someone's assets were clearly in the wrong. But rather than thinking through the governance issues that were revealed by the crisis and trying to improve things we got a new set of witnesses that mostly copied the same broken practices as the old ones, eg doing everything behind the scenes in private chat groups.