"With great power comes great responsibility". The fate of Steemit will ultimately depend on how responsibly the Stakeholders (a.k.a. "whales) will steer the platform. The have the power to signal to the whole community, through their votes, what type of content Steemit wants to select. To me, Steemit's direct analog in the pre-crypto world is Medium. Medium uses "claps" whereas Steemit went to a lot more trouble to actually design an incentive-based system. It "put more brain" in order to enable the platform to select better content. The tools are here. But the selection still needs to be made.