Hello @guntotnhippie, nice to Steem you! Thanks for delivering us such a worthy article (and thanks to @vimukthi for echoing it to a larger audience :-)).

There would be an entire book to write around the topics you tackle here. As far as I've seen from my limited Steemian experience (3 months of activity here, in 3 different linguistic communities), Steemit's "original sin" is the same as in any "State-framed liberal society": making us believe that through this network we can at the same time meet economic / financial success ("sell our creativity and be clients to other Steemians creativity") and fulfill our political nature ("be an electronic citizen"), all that on the basis of individual desires / interests.

If it could work - to a certain extent - among a group of like-minded persons, with the same level of institutional understanding (ask 10 randomly selected Steemians what are actually doing the Witnesses, and what are the guidelines of the SBD monetary policy, you'll see the results...), in a mass of 750,000 people with so diverse cultural background, social conditions, educations and intentions regarding this platform, it's vowed to failure. Steemit is currently a victim of certain "universalist integrative vision" quite common amongst informatics developers, not to say amongst blockchain-enthusiasts. What is supposed to be accepted - and somatized - by all Humanity, after having been catholicism, psychoanalysis, marxism or liberalism, now is "algorithm regulated democracy".

I'd advocate for the creation of a " Minnows Steemit", where the first 6 months of our interactions with the ecosystem will be oriented towards social rules, economic mechanisms and self-empowerment learnings (through NON monetary means), as a mimimum measure to discard the powermongers, the mentally disturbed and the sociality destroyers Steemians to be...