The minute speculators stop buying Steem it may collapse because there is no business model or revenue source only the hope speculators will value a site attracting users and not use common sense.
The platform itself may not have ads, but the content itself can be ad-style / ad-supported even include gray-advertising. So, in that sense, purchasing steem power also gives you the power to commercialize products and services by reaching a broader audience.
Unfortunately Steem will have a limited future if content is manipulated in that way...
Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features... making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiggSocial media site Soshable graphed 118 stories on the once-fabled Digg front page in three days after the new iteration's release. Six publishers and one influential technology pundit control the lion share of Digg's most important space, it shows.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-redesign-revolthttp://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/07/12/digg-once-worth-164-million-sold-to-betaworks-for-500k/#6927d6682c66Unfortunately having content ranked not on what is the most popular but what has the most money behind it will effectively result in censorship because whales or large corporate interests can dictate what users primarily view.
Media integrity
Media integrity refers to the ability of a media outlet to serve the public interest and democratic process, making it resilient to institutional corruption within the media system, economy of influence, conflicting dependence and political clientelism. Such a situation enables excessive instrumentalisation of the media for particular political interests, which is subverting democratic role of the media.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownershipThe Steemit system ensures viewers will in the not too distant future see a front page of either advertising or government sponsored political propaganda & views not supported by the largest corporate/political interests will be buried.
Assuming it survives to that stage this process will alienate users and freedom minded contributors. This was the downfall of Digg and also one of the reasons Reddit has had user revolts recently.
I proposed a
hypothetical solution for that:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/improving-steem-s-rankings-to-cater-to-diverse-content-preferencesIn my solution, if whales don't have similar preferences to your own, then you do not see their voting power in the rankings you view.
Note my solution doesn't remove the stake-weighting of voting power within your coterie (nor overall for the author's payout), but it makes it less possible for whales to influence everyone's vote by controlling what everyone sees at the top of their personalized coterie.
It is not desirable to remove stake-weighted voting power because otherwise there's no resource to limit spam, unless you switched to pay-per-activity (e.g. proof-of-work submitted on each activity).
Note the non-linear weighting of total voting power for each post is an orthogonal issue to the stake-weighting. It has multiple effects including giving whales more influence and a feedback vortex (voters vote on what they see at the top because buried posts aren't seen) causing a few top posts to be paid much more than most of the rest. My proposal above dilutes these effects.