As long as Steemit (the company) complies with copyright requests by taking down (hiding from viewers and search engines) illegally published content, things will continue as they are.

Which is a problem - first, because the idea behind Steemit is to concentrate unique content, thus increasing the price of Steem and second, because Steemit is trying to create censorship resistant media, only to censor its own users.

BTW, the price of Steem going up has nothing to do with the direction of the social media (i.e. going in the right direction). On the contrary, if it weren't for Bitcoin, Steem would be even lower in value.