The biggest problem with Steemit is indeed any sort of financial incentives. If there were none, Steemit would still have excessively low quality posts and tons of spam, just the spam would evolve from shit posting to "blah blah blah ultra vitamin cure cancer blah blah blah increase penis size too blah blah 100% health in 1 month blah blah links here" then insert tons of affiliate links, link wheeling, social media profiles etc. This includes especially in your comments section which is what would be hit the hardest.

I've just created my own cryptocurrency 2 days ago, I've not yet implemented anything with it as I'm working more towards full social network as opposed to blogging platform. This project, though, will likely die before it starts, so don't expect me to end up releasing anything due to lack of capital to implement what I have as this little side project. Shrug

To my understanding, though, Dan already has some plans to start a Steemit competitor using EOS, we'll have to wait and see what becomes of that.