Why do I keep using Reddit (as opposed to just Steem)?

Reddit is completely centralized.

Censorship is rampant; moderators can remove anything they like for any reason. Some may create rules, some of those will adhere to them consistently, but ultimately it's just up to the subreddit how they approach censorship and moderation policy, there is no requirement that they are consistent and no system of accountability. Admins can outright delete posts or modify other people's posts (the CEO was caught doing this once). They delete and quarantine subreddits that are controversial, and are likely under pressure from advertisers and investors to keep the site "advertiser friendly"; ie. highly sanitized.

The voting system is easily and frequently abused with sybil attacks, which create false perceptions of popularity. The ranking system also amplifies the normal group-think effects that you get in most online forums, because a small difference in the number of upvotes vs downvotes can result in the impression of major consensus; often a false impression.

So why do I keep using it anyway? Steem is far from perfect, but has at least partial answers to most of these problems. It also has the potential to improve, which seems less likely for Reddit.

Steem is No Good for Narrow Interests

Lately I have been less obsessed with Steem, I've been doing other things. I have many interests outside of Steem, but writing or reading about them on Steem doesn't make sense compared to on Reddit. If I were to write a post about something going on in the world of electric cars, the only people who would see it are my Steem followers. Some of them might be interested in electric cars by coincidence, but generally the thing my followers have in common is an interest in Steem. Anything else is incidental. My blog about electric cars coming up would be noise in their feeds.

Nobody else would see the post. Someone specifically looking for blogs about electric cars might use the tag system to find it; but sadly the tag system isn't very good for finding good quality posts about a certain topic. People don't use it because it doesn't work well. If the post has good SEO, it will be ranked on Google, and a handful of people may find it that way, weeks or months after the post went up, long after payout.

Reddit is really good for narrow interests. You can subscribe to the specific subreddits that interest you, which are typically topic-centric. The users of those forums are constantly sorting them, bringing the most relevant stuff to the top. Even if you have little/no following or history on Reddit, if you make a good and relevant post you can easily get to the front of a subreddit. This works pretty well most of the time, despite flaws and weaknesses. Steem curation generally doesn't work for this purpose at all, despite curators being rewarded. It never really worked, under any reward paradigm that we've had. It seems likely that rewards for curation actually results in worse curation.

It's sad to say this is one of the biggest drawbacks of Steem that seemed like it would be improved all the way back in 2016. We were talking about a "communities" feature all the way back then, in fact it was initially roadmapped for early 2017 release. Today we have what we need technically - hivemind was created to support this kind of custom sorting of Steem data. If any front end replaces Steemit.com for me, it will be one that manages to crack 'Reddit'-like functionality.