My answer to /u/aminok on his criticisms of Steem

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Most Steemit transactions are database entries for its articles and extremely low-value. That's why Steemit market capitalization is so low compared to the top blockchains.

I disagree, but this is entirely tangential to your previous points. It does not substantiate Steem being centralized nor does it substantiate the claim that Steem is not processing cryptocurrency transactions. Even if you exclude all other kinds of transactions, including many financial transactions such as the allocation of votes which results in exchange of financial value, and only count transfer transactions, Steem is doing equivalent daily transfers to Litecoin, far more than almost all other blockchains except for Bitcoin and Ethereum.

That comment you quoted is incorrect in a range of ways.

DPOS allows all coin holders to vote on who the nodes running the consortium chain are

DPOS allows coin holders to elect the block producers. Since solo miners produce so few blocks, this is similar to mining hashpower allocated to mining pools in Bitcoin.

This, together with the lack of in-protocol economic incentives for these master nodes to behave correctly

Witnesses which do not behave correctly are quickly ejected via vote. This has happened several times when witnesses fail to produce blocks reliably, the voters are very responsive in practice. In Steem no witness has yet tried to cheat the system in a more directly malicious way, which implies the incentives are working and the threat of lost income is sufficient. If/when they do, we will see how quickly they lose their income.

the lack of client-side validation capability

Nodes validate the chain just as in other blockchains. There is no non-validating client as of yet in Steem, although reduced validation clients similar to SPV in Bitcoin will be possible in the future.

Low voter participation (the DAO carbonvote, the current EIP186 carbonvote, the DAO proposal votes, and even Bitshares DPOS votes in 2014 all had <10% participation)

I suggest you review participation in Steem witness voting and budget allocation. Steem is not BitShares, and has extremely high participation.

Game-theoretic tragedy-of-the-commons vulnerabilities: because each voter only has a tiny chance of influencing the result, their incentive to vote correctly is thousands of times lower than the socially optimal incentive. This means that situations like everyone putting their coins on exchanges and exchanges voting on users' behalf, with users not really caring how exchanges vote with their money, are likely to happen.

Steem voting has non-discrete outcomes both for witness voting and budget allocation. The commenter sounds like he's taking the US electoral process or first past the post and assuming Steem voting works the same way. The "likely to happen" scenario has not happened because the same game theory does not apply.

Coin holder interests are not perfectly aligned with user interests, and so proposals that increase coin prices at the expense of making the system useful may get implemented.

I will give you this one, although the author sounds like he's never been involved or used Steem at all. Steem has shitloads of problems, largely social problems relating to the distribution of power and perceived short term vs. long term profit outcomes. It's true that voter interests and user interests aren't perfectly aligned, and this results in problems in all systems. Miner interests are not perfectly aligned with Bitcoin users, Bitcoin developers are not perfectly aligned with Bitcoin users, merchants or payment processers. At least in Steem these imperfections are getting improved and interests are getting better aligned over time as we work through the problems.

To add to that, representative democracy has a tendency toward extreme centralization, with a small elite composing the pool of candidates likely to be elected. The delegates also have to make themselves known to stand a chance of being elected, and can be held liable for what happens on the blockchain. It's thus a trusted third party system which is exactly what cryptocurrency was designed to make unnecessary.

Steem uses an approval voting system, it is not representative democracy. Bitcoin mining is actually closer to representative democracy than Steem witness voting, where the vast majority of hashpower votes for as few as three to four block producing entities which produce over 50% of blocks, and rarely if ever change their vote. Approval rather than representative voting means that there is a much higher level of consensus over who is elected as a block producer, and a higher level of accountability, and it takes a larger number of colluding entities to form a majority.

It's thus a trusted third party system which is exactly what cryptocurrency was designed to make unnecessary.

You don't trust block producers in Steem any more than you trust block producers in Bitcoin. The fact that block producers are accountable to stakeholders is a feature, not a bug. Block producers in Bitcoin also are known entities (Jihan Wu, Bobby Lee, Wang Chun etc. are known personalities), but miners pretty much never change their vote because the participation is fire and forget.