Organic growth is essential. This means that the users come to the site for what drives a long-term growth of the value of the activity on the site.

Users are enticed to come to the site to figure out how to game it for money:

• Authors figuring out how to game the "circlejerk" groupthink that is created by the concentration of voting power (and this voting power is necessarily concentrated per the logic on my blog post).
• Curators figuring out to frontrun (game) the same groupthink.
• Looming prospect of pacts forming as it becomes evident that it is a "last man out the door" dilemma.

Afaics there is virtually no energy spent on actually trying to write for divergent communities (and if you do you are penalized), because there is no economic reward for doing so. I will probably only earn ~$250 for this blog post even though I've invested perhaps the most effort in it of all my blogs (note I wrote this blog not for earning but because I want to discuss this important issue), and some clickbait opportunist who messed up the math from my prior blog post earned $4000 (double what I earned in my correct blog post). So many examples where gaming the groupthink is transferring outsized rewards to content that doesn't really focus on any community strongly but is able to fool whales into thinking it has wide appeal. Wide appeal is not organic engagement!

The problem is the design did not incentivize organic growth of the activity of forming communities of like-minded interests. That was never contemplated in the design of the system as far as I can see from reading the white paper.

I also can't say I've seen the vulnerabilities in #2 manifest in terms of pacts amongst whales just yet. Of course it is possible. It certainly would be in tune with what happens in the rest of crypto.

When and if it becomes apparent that the option of whales working together to build something is not possible because of flaws in the design, then the first whale to defect and start paying kickbacks to slave authors in order to accelerate his cashout rate, will set off a monkey-see-monkey-must-copy effect, because nobody wants to be left holding the bag.

I don't know when or if that will happen, but it seems game theoretically inevitable unless some other factor overwhelms (or if I have a mistake in my understanding of the game theory).

However it would be so transparent and foolhardy, that I struggle to believe anyone can be that short-sighted, especially given the inroads Steemit is making into the social media space in such a short space of time.

I am also very excited and enthused to see so many people joining and especially the high proportion of females. But I also am fearful that this could be a big bust and perhaps even cause those females to (become wary and) run away from blockchain stuff in the future. We not only have a big opportunity but also a huge responsibility to not mess it up.

Females either come to build social experiences within their interests and memes (or they come to game the community of horny, adulating, travelust nerds). If we inundate them with cryptospeak and cryptorollercoaster speculation, then they may come to form an opinion that crypto stuff is not their home. Btw, I highly commend @dan (@dantheman) on his solution of the crypto security issue. That is potentially a major innovation and could go a long way to helping the masses trust crypto blockchains.

You are arguing the Nash equilibrium which is that defection is not an ideal strategy. But I think that normally ignores opportunity cost. Nash equilibrium can sustain for a while when the upside appears to be very significant, but if upside slows down then opportunists get restless to seek out their opportunity cost.

I'm now convinced a blockchain based social media platform will take off. Steemit has first mover advantage.

I am not convinced although I am excited to try. The reason I am not convinced is because we don't know if we've proven a scalable incentive for blockchains. We are seeing some hype effect right now and everyone is patting each other on the back, but we haven't proven out the hard problem of scaling incentives and avoiding game theory debacles.

It doesn't need to be perfect (and isn't) it just needs to top Facebook etc., in terms of censorship and rewards to contributors, they can muddle their way through the rest.

I keep trying to point out the flaw in this pervasive argument to @smooth and others, but seems they strongly disagree with me (and probably think I am a jealous party pooper). You are are thinking that 1 + 1 = 2 and I am trying to point out that 1 + 1 can equal -1. This is because the economic incentives are driving the opposite of organic growth, so you end up having a negative scaling effect. Thus if my assumption is correct, then there is no muddle through and only disadvantages compared to Facebook. Balancing factors are the extreme hope and idealism that is in the crypto community which is what I think is currently sustaining this, but I am not sure.