It’s funny, I’ve been musing over this very concept myself over the past weeks:

Taking a hypothetical example, a user with a large amount of resources (say an institution or government with $50m) and devious intentions could buy into steem (over a period of time) and wield their significant power to the detriment of the community: for example by downvoting any articles that did not fit with their own political views.

We’ve seen evidence of the difficulty for the community to have an impact on some high value wars on rewards. We all know the example.

I extrapolated this to nefarious individuals deciding they wanted to control a social media ecosystem. There’s a lot of cash rich people in this world, there’s a lot of crypto rich people in this world. Any one could decide to wage a personal war if they wished and there is little in terms of mechanism to stop them.

There is a lot of championing over the concept of decentralised social media. The reality is that the structures are in place to allow those with money to centralise to their purposes, to a degree.

Another user said to me that this is where SMT hard forking may come in to play, as communities decide to opt out from whatever political battle is deciding to be waged. So there is that at least, as it has been shown on other networks that there are those who absolutely love to monetise populism, and it won’t be too long before they notice that they can transfer that rather negative energy over here.