I think there's this sort of weird attitude towards investors, as if it's a good idea to invest in Steem, and we want people to be buying it just for the purpose of buying it. But capitalizing Steem itself doesn't actually do anything; sure, it raises the price, and that can be helpful for those of us who build things. But unless they're actually doing something with that Steem, they're not really investors, they're just speculators.

in some sense everyone active on Steem is building a small business, and if their business model is making crappy posts and bidding them up massively, then naturally they're going to come in for some criticism for what they've chosen to invest in, just as, say, telephone spammers do in the offline world.

There really isn't any shortage of ability to invest in real projects here, if that's what someone wants. I'm not sure very many of them are great, from a capital perspective, but partly that's because very few of them are putting the effort in to be great because they perceive the available rewards of bootstrapping here to be greater than the available rewards from using outside capital.

Smart outside capital ought to see that and be interested in investigating the projects that aren't chasing them.