RE: What will it take for Steem to reach "the masses"?
I think the original vision of steem had a significant "wisdom of crowds" element in post evaluation, but that model doesn't seem to work that well when post valuations are dominated by large-stakeholder votes. There's a tension between saying the value-proposition of holding Steem Power is that you get a say in what is or isn't valued, and the long-term value of the post-rankings mapping to something that seems to make sense to "normies". If there was a large population independently voting with somewhat comparable stakes we'd probably be in a different environment. Our current reality is a small population where most people's votes barely register and a few have huge influence.
I think it makes sense to think of over- or undervaluing a post as a negative externality like pollution -- it undermines the credibility of the platform. Good stuff not getting rewarded leads to people thinking there's no point in trying to post good stuff, bad stuff getting rewarded makes people think they're likely to get a raw deal.
Agreed. I think the original idea was for posts to "bubble up", but it's never really worked out that way because larger stakeholders lose out on curation rewards that way, so they prefer to vote at the front of the line. I think the piece that some large stakeholders might be missing is that their stake gets more valuable if they can encourage investment by helping the smaller curators to increase their rewards.
It seems like Steemit and one or two witnesses probably get that, but some of the "smaller" big stakeholders - not so much.
I think there might be a tragedy-of-the-commons thing happening where the optimal long-term collective action is to grow the value of the ecosystem, but it's easy for each individual to prioritize short-term value extraction while expecting somebody else to do the work to cultivate growth.
You may be right. I definitely think there's a tragedy of the commons dynamic in play with posting abuse for some authors who don't have any substantial skin in the game. With curators, there's a counterbalance, because people with more stake have a bigger motive to protect it, but some of the same incentives are still in play.