Is it a place where we exchange our goods and services with each other in a peer to peer system?
Is it a blogging platform?
Is it a place where you just buy upvotes, no matter what kind of post it is?
Is it a place where everything is for sale including Steem Power, Reputation, friendship and everything else that is sellable?
Is it a competitor for blogging platforms like Medium?
Is it a place where we learn how to build bots to automate our income?
Is it a place where we discover new ideas?
Is it a place where we form smaller collectives, in order to have a sort of basic income model, where bare bones money for survival is mostly automated so that we can focus on building a better world?
Arguably, yes to all of the above.
Steemit is an experiment. Perhaps we have simply not yet discovered what its most important function will be.