Yes, this is a bit of controversial title, but I was actually wondering whether Steem could ever evolve into what it was meant to be: a platform on which users get financially rewarded for producing high-quality content.

Lately, a lot of long-term users have been complaining about the shitty quality of the overall content and people simply fishing for votes in order to make some small gains. This e.g. resulted in @schattenjaeger suggesting some big-time changes in his iconic post to make Steemit more efficient. Alright, this was fun. But then it wasn't, because there's actually a lot to it.

Apart from that, we've been facing Steem Wars, a dominance of bots, centralization issues, the broken SBD "peg", etc, etc, so it's time to analyze whether all (or any) of these issues can be overcome and whether Steem has a future as the thing that it's supposed to be.

Let's have a look at the underlying phenomena, first.

Centralization

Systems have kind of a natural tendency to centralize with time. In physics, we have gravity, in economy, we have capital, in societies, we have leaders (whether they're elected or born), and we have cities. The same is true for pretty much all blockchain projects:

As soon as a token is involved, some users start amassing a big majority of these and it keeps getting worse. There is yet one (large) blockchain project to be found where resources like mining power or stake do not have a tendency to get more and more centralized. This also happened to Steem - some of the early users have earned so much Steem that new users will never to able to compete with them, unless they buy into a huge stake of Steem themselves. This can be easily seen in the following aspects:

• "Rich" users can afford for paying bots to appear on the Trending tab
• Rich users stake bots / other users or vote for themselves to get the biggest reward share possible

New users, however, don't even have enough SP so that their vote would actually count anything. Okay, this is also due to the Steem price, but actually it is really frustrating if you vote good content, but your vote merely increases the vote count by one, but doesn't help with the anticipated payout (let alone any curation rewards). Even me being fairly active haven't produced any notable rewards over the 10 months I've been around here, despite trying to provide valuable content whenever I post anything.

Bad content can get rewards

Whatever content you write, due to the curation mechanisms of Steem, you can get rewards for it. Even if it's just a copied meme, some boilerplate post, a link or a blank page, as long as the post is there, you can get (or buy) votes and have a positive ROI for up to 10 posts a day. This is harsh, and surely not what has been intended.

In addition, due to the 7-day voting period, short-lived content is more rewarding than elaborated evergreen content. News are better than truths.

Curation is not used to point to the best or most valuable posts, but to the ones that are paying for the votes. The biggest bots have accumulated (even if only through delegation) millions of SP, so they can direct which posts have a chance of being seen by a broader audience. Services like Steemauto, Smartsteem, Steemfollower, etc, are enabling users to make money by providing voting services to anyone paying with their votes or Steem / SBD. Most of the voting takes place out of financial interest, not because there is great content. Or at least most of the rewards are generated that way.

One of the most intriguing observations is that some posts get more votes than views, which is really hard to believe from a human point of view.

Bots

This is actually obvious after what I've written above. Bots dominate the Steem ecosystem. It's not only voting bots, but also all types of special curation (coin bots, plagiarism bots, comment bots, etc) or auto-generated content (stats, news, etc) bots. I'm not saying there's anything inherently bad about any of these bots, but they're there, and they have a huge impact.

Is Steem doomed?

I've been thinking about that for a while now, and I don't have a clear answer. I'll try to elaborate on my thoughts on that, but as this one has gotten fairly long already, I'll give it a second part (despite the fact that some might say I only want to grab more rewards :-D ).

Until then, feel free to comment on what you think is most broken about Steem and how it can / could be fixed.