RE: Does It Really Matter How People Make Money on Steemit?
You can have "regulation" without a "regulator", in this case, the community. I don't think we'll see the situation that you have in, say, Reddit's TIL with users getting up-voted for re-posting items or even blatant plagiarism. When you see this effect there and check out the comments, all the established users and top comments are attacking the poster, pointing out they down-voted, complaining how "the sub is garbage".
Yet, the post is still upvoted, why? Because all votes are equal at Reddit and the platform is flooded with mostly non-posters who don't engage beyond a few voting clicks. Steemit has reputation and voting power adjusted by your investment in the platform. My guess is if you applied that to the "Reddit TIL" model, suddenly those top commenters (who spend most of the time there and know the re-posts) would be able to drum out the low quality items, rendering them without reward. Remove the up-vote and financial incentives to post garbage, you should get less of it.
I will note that there are parties with external financial incentives to distort speech, and these parties engage in practices, like buying Reddit accounts, to manipulate the platform.
This may also be something that impacts Steemit. It should not be allowed to, unless you feel that Steemit should not be a platform for free speech.
I just realized that Steemit is designed to be a platform for paid speech, and this is antithetical to free speech. I will further consider that before commenting further, but to state that this will impact the community and the platform, particularly in a time where England has just proposed a drastic and utterly unworkable censorship law.
Countries are enacting laws against free speech, to greater and lesser degrees, surveillance is chilling free speech, propaganda is distorting free speech in order to distort political power. These are problems I seek, personally, to solve, and reasons why I came to Steemit.
I hope this is food for thought for others. It is for me.
Unfortunately, government intrusion will always be a problem.