I am very critical about the monetary issues on steem. It is a good platform, a decentralised peer-to-peer network and as such it has great value. I expect users to continue growing and steem being successful over the short term.

On the monetary side, steem issues tokens. But why should anyone care about them?
You require some to have a fully functional account but currently, to help growth, these are delegated to you anyways.
Then you can employ these tokens to direct the reward pool. But where does the value of the reward pool come from in the first place?

Currently it is that people are willing to pay money because for the tokens because
a) they like having a lot of steem and influence
b) they speculate that the price of steem will go up

That does not sound like a sustainable business case to me. It somehow resembles a ponzi sheme. People that have steem can basically generate money and that value is supported by an influx of new users that also want to have steem.

We see a lot of shady things around these topics these days and eventually they will take steem down.

So I think that as soon as we have a decentralised platform where the reward structure is aligned with beneficial behaviour we will see the end of steem. Contrary to the ideas of many people, I think that this new platform aught to involve adds to generate real value that can support the platform in the long run.