Thank you for your thoughts and very detailed description of the business side of Steemit. Yes, Steemit may be a business first and a social network second for many whales - they think mainly in ROI - all true. I think, this is a huge problem though, because when the product becomes just the earning potential instead of providing value through content, we are confronted with what we have here at the moment: whales fighting each other over bigger shares of the reward pool with no content at all and stupid people behaving like sheep, who get dragged into this fight, forced to take a side in a school yard brawl scenario, where they just choose which bully they support.
This is much more a war over power and money and against all goals what Steemit can become.
To make things worse, most newbies that are yet to come, will not be content producers at all. We know from other social media sites, that 90% of people don´t want or are not able to produce content at all - they are passive consumers, who will also not understand the business side and never earn anything here, but are desperately needed for growing the social network in the future.
Especially for these people, we need strong leaders, who produce real value through content that enhances peoples lifes!
What I´m trying to say here is, that for this to happen, we need to become these leaders, who concentrate on the core features of producing this valuable content much more than thinking in terms of ROI. Otherwise Steemit will not grow and we all have to face the fact, that all the Steem we hold in our wallets will become worthless. We have to concentrate on enhancing the value of Steem through providing more valuable content, to make a long term increase of Steem possible!