I actually think that the price curves and other metrics reflect something quite novel not just in the blogosphere, social network realm, and cryptosphere, but something entirely new. Steem is like the real world. What happens in it depends on what people are doing. @ned and @dantheman may have had some inkling about how intensely emotive their platform might end up being, but it has proven very very very powerful. The crabs in buckets metaphor is absolutely brilliant, and maybe a factor they didn't anticipate from the image comes from the fact that the ones in the bucket snip at each other as well.

We are all working together, to work out how to use it, and part of this is to do with finding the problems, and bringing them to the attention of those who are doing the development work. Even the sleazebags trying to game the system are helping, and the sense of gravity about the stakes in the situation, I think it finally makes a real step from mostly masturbatory, inconsequential blather, to a real, functioning social system within the internet.

Sure, maybe these other networks that are coming up are going to do well too. I wish them, and all the adopters, the best of luck. But us Steemians, we have the advantage of having swum around in the very first of this kind of platform, and we are, as predicted, very loyal to it, at least I can say this for myself, and I see other people saying the same. Core principles of the architecture are being forged in fire here. Even if somehow Steem were to not survive, what everyone has learned from it is going to have very significant consequences for the future.