a bit after the fact by now, sorry but much truth in that , steemit has been walled off, for someone like me who practically lives in a borg cube i didnt even hear about it until it was nearly two years old, which is REALLY strange because i burned one or two GPU's mining BTC back when you could actually get a cent out of it lol.
But, since then, and by now, i'm almost convinced "they" (the protectorate or whatever one wants to call it) WANT it that way. The way i see it : inhere they're big fish, the biggest fish in the pond, but globably and universally this thing is but a little puddle and out there they would be the sardines, not the sharks (i think its an insult to real whales in most cases as those animals dont deserve to be a metafor for bloated moneypiles , not everyone included ofcourse)
As you say, the focus is on money, but i think its not simply that. Most here (specially those who were from the start) came in it with money and they have been, pardon my french 'circlejerking' for the spotlight. The emphasis on "how to do it" , "how to expand your network" "how to manage" and what not is totally averse to a blogspot , which is meant for expression. I'd almost call it narcissism in some cases, plus the company that's mistaken for the blockchain it runs on hasnt done very well in bettering that image. It's an elitist small pack and at this very moment the "bring a friend and some money to save the whale" makes it even sound more so (lets not mention ojou-sama versus the normies there) It's insulting at times, and not just insulting intelligence.
The biggest flaw was probably PAYING people to run nodes lol, it makes it all about money-politics : in the beginning it literally rained thousands of dollars a month on the top 20 (or was that 50 ?), something a few of them will be seriously hungover on by now i guess but
the blame put on the bots and the smallfry using them ... if you did the math and counted up all the small accounts and what they cost in a month compared to the top 20 and the company itself selling off its own coin to "pay the bills", without even looking for an alternative income for YEARS (as Churchill might have joked in privat maybe : it takes a world war to get the americans started ... not anti-american btw ... just a bit of the problem with the self-proclaimed 'leaders of the free world')
BTC has over 9000 nodes and nobody gets paid to run them while here the concept of de-centralized is a bit like the illusion of western particracy :

you get 20 people deciding, presided by the council and the emperor lol , thats hardly de-centralized, actually belgium has at least ten times that amount of politicians ... per region , maybe per province so that would make this place more de-centralized than this place in here which is beyond monty python-absurd.
I gotta admit, i had great hopes of making a euro here, it all looked GREAT (until steemcleaners attacked) that's another thing, the downvotes and the censoring but that got covered in your last post or post before that to which i already replied (i am actually trying to script something that would let one enter an accountname and a permlink(post link) and parse the replies automatically if they're put like you described) to get some kind of systemic consensus parser

its here atm (and its because you planted the idea, with no obligations or questions asked there, i just suddenly thought : "i can do that" ... so i try)

https://tyrnannoght.000webhostapp.com/tyrsubtabs/rpls.php

its not clear of, you can scroll to the bottom it almost parsed out the replies which the step after would make it possible to add them all up and print out a nice table , maybe even in post-ready format

not because or for you but THANKS for the idea, always nice to have something like that to do, if it ever gets presentable i'll put it up in public anyway. Just doing my thing there, i dont care much for "what opinion or post type or topic will get the most" and i certainly dont hang around witness accounts hoping for a whale commentvote lol. Also the fact that some people are downright frightened to put money on it because of the new downvote cartels forming and the justification from above ... im not convinced they grasp the reality of the masses they so desperately try to onboard BUT

i already stated it somewhere, even at a dollarcent its just too cool to play with so ill porbably be here until they tear down the last node and if that happens im sure it will hurt the millionnaires a lot more than it will hurt me, but i kinda hope it doesn't and i can launch my game by 2050 connected to a few blockchains and actually have some money by the time i'm 90

what struck me most in the week or so before the apocalypse here is how certain highpowered accounts all started posting and a lot more and ALL had the same message, you would think in parliament there'd be discussion but it was like pre-meditated propaganda all over the place, out of the blue and from what i see so far ... nothings changed much except my posts get me 5 cents instead of 10

if you , like me, speak without thinking or you only speak when it flows by itself an extra wont make a difference, i gave up not being who i am long before ned and dan were a couple, and probably long before they were still playing playmobil hehee (woa, ducks i spoke the name that shan't be spoken)

there's some great people here, with fantastic minds and great ideas but as for social experiment i have to disagree with you on one part :
i think it succeeded,
perfectly
in showing that a micro-level society is an exact mirror of the macro : 1% - 99% ... 99.5% dog eat dog and mostly smoke and mirrors haha

lets not lose sleep over it and keep that german filosofy coming , i can see why most of the elder historical figures in the field came from, all around the area, right (i mean the western world) - you seem to have the gene , lol

anyway ... @yapcat be my name now and i'm sure it's well chosen ... gotta be careful i dont forget to eat and breathe when my fingers start clacking