In reading a post by @timcliff I decided I will chime in with what makes Steem valuable to me. His post here

What types of contributions do you consider adding value?

I personally think there are some great groups dedicated to fully utilizing this platform for the free speech censorship proof aspect of it. Our very own @informationwar or @familyprotection or @deepdives or other people/groups who are putting important information out there about what is happening in the world.

In order to counter the MSM's clickbait style OP-eds that disguise themselves as "journalism" we need a platform that allows it to be censorship proof. Even if someone downvotes what you write it is still there and your followers and expand it to see it, truly a great feature. Your content cannot be removed(as far as I am aware, barring a hardfork). So that is great.

That in of itself gives me all the value I want and need, making some extra cryptocurrency on the side is a bonus to me that will help during the next Great Depression we go through in the USA! ;)

What types of things will you upvote/reward?

I typically upvote/reward things that have to deal with factual reporting/truthseeking stuff. Exposing corrupt governments, some crypto stuff, I follow the curation trail of @informationwar on 100% upvote so most of it is for that effort for now(to help all the new people grow).

I have also helped out some others with their projects with sending them SBD, Tom Dugan needed a camera and I sent over 10 SBD for the fund raising effort(which I made from my posts). We also upvoted some of the friends Tom Dugan and rewarded their posts so they could raise some funds that way too.

What types of things will you downvote?

I extremely rarely downvote. If a spam bot comments on my stuff I usually do not downvote it, but if it has a positive reputation or has some earned rewards I will downvote it. Someone stole someone's blog post before(word for word) and I downvoted some of those, and I think someone stole one of mine at some point.

What types of projects will you consider delegating SP to?

The @informationwar is the only one I have delegated too right now. In the future as I gain more SP I may delegate to some others. Right now the @informationwar has about 23,000 total SP backing it(Curation Trail/Upvote Followers + Delegations).

General Thoughts

While we certainly need there to be less spam posts and more quality posts, I think having communities and groups largely fixes that. I don't go through trending tabs on anything due to bid bots artificially rising posts to the top that didn't get their by merit. Bidbots left unchecked will centralize too much Steempower into the hands of few, though as long as we maintain a certain level of decentralization that may never be any kind of issue. But we want to keep Steem as decentralized as possible and that means speaking out against consolidation of power.

The more steempower one has the higher up in witness rank they could go. They could do some kind of attack as they gain higher standing as a witness. Similar(although not the same) as when a bitcoin mining operation has more and more hashrate(at one point someone had about 45%). It is very dangerous when centralization starts getting that high %wise.

In order for Steem to survive for a long time the decentralization culture needs to take hold and things need to be done to keep decentralization possible and or make it harder for centralization to happen.

I suspect SMTs are going to have more disastrous results than many of you realize. Essentially the biggest whales can start their own SMT, hype it to all hell(like we see with ICOs on Ethereum) and make a bunch of money from it and sell there tokens for Steem. Something like 97% of all ICOs made on Ethereum fall apart and the investors lose money. This is due to a bunch of novice investors throwing their moon money that they made from buying into crypto early, it unfortunately lends credence to the fact that there is a real reason in the real world where only accredited investors are allowed to invest in start ups and venture funds(in the USA).

So we will have like 95% of SMTs be total failures and or scams that lose the investor money, what will the scammers do with their Steem they raised from SMT? Power up and become more powerful and thus more centralization will occur. And if you think that for some reason SMTs won't have exactly the same failure rate as the ICOs on Ethereum I don't now what to tell you, no proof exists that the same thing won't happen...

So I do fully expect Steem to become more centralized into the hands of whoever figures out how to make the most money from SMTs. Whether or not this affects who is a witness(and wants to keep things decentralized) we will have to wait and see. It could doom this platform even faster, or if for some reason a bunch of people band together and make a bunch of money who are the "good guys" who want to keep Steem decentralized than maybe there is some hope. But given the track record of ICOs I extremely doubt it. There are outright scam ICOs that raise 100 million USD, which can buy a lot of Steempower. Won't take many scam SMTs for a few manipulative people to own a lot of the % of SP.

Conclusion

The price of Steem and or Steem itself is doomed if SMTs come out(again if I understand how much power a witness has, can they do attacks like a 51% that bitcoin does?). 100% without a doubt in my mind. I have seen so many scam ICOs happen on Ethereum and you can google it and see just how many scams there are and how much money they make. Doesn't take more than a handful of people and some bullshit to get it going.

I will stick around on steemit and continue to use the Steem blockchain regardless though. I am not here for profit as I mentioned earlier I am here for the #informationwar and truth and censorship proof blog posts. I like being here regardless if the price of Steem is 0.000001 of a penny or whatever. The more SP the @informationwar has the better off we are in attracting more members, but ultimately just having a few hundred minnows posting for years and spreading out onto all social media platforms will create a large impact anyways. It will take time to build this all.

Resources:

https://gizmodo.com/guy-who-ran-really-really-huge-scam-warns-icos-are-the-1819756698

https://steemit.com/scam/@moonjelly/how-to-create-an-ico-scam-in-5-simple-steps

https://www.investopedia.com/news/80-icos-are-scams-report/

https://cryptoinsider.21mil.com/four-in-five-ico-classified-scam/