Can Steemit Scale? Will Rival Platforms Appear?

As the platform grows and more users flood in over the course of this year, I really wonder the effects it will have on the usability and speed of the steem sites.

This is obviously a brand new concept and already I notice that there is a slight delay between posting, voting and commenting by comparison to the instantaneous nature of the other social media sites we are use to.
Of course the delay currently is tiny but will it continue to increase as the blockchain gets more and more added to it?

I am asking this ignorantly as I am not totally clued up on the tech behind steemit and how well it scales and I was wondering if anyone who saw this post knows about the future.

Also with the respectable success of steemit it does make me believe there will be copycat or innovative sites using a similar concept appearing too within time.
I wonder long term, if steemit will be the most established, dominant and most used of the bunch or if a new generation of social media blockchain site will take over as the king of this very unique space?

My personal opinion to these questions (Bare in mind this is very ignorant as I do not know a lot) is eventually we will see steemit have issues with scaling but I on the other hand think that will be something that is worked through and steemit will remain on top even as new sites appear!!

That is what I am hoping also as I am now a proud steemian and love how helpful this site has been to me, I will be strongly supporting it, it's community and it's intent for a long time to come.

Please share your thoughts!

I really want to learn more from talking to people of all different experience levels and hearing their thoughts on matters like this!