I'm not very happy with the idea of universal social capital in Steem.
Steem is basically an anonymous/pseudonymous network. Very few of us know each other face to face, we see only the usernames. Reputation score created by this kind of network doesn't really tell much about the person. Mostly it just indicates how much content user has submitted and has it been spam or other unwanted posts. If I have high reputation score, what that actually means? Can other people derive some essential information about me by looking at it? Not really.
But if we enable communities in Steem, social capital (recorded in the blockchain) becomes much more valuable. Individuals who belong to a certain community can see who are the most trusworthy users in that community.
Lately I've been thinking more about my idea of ownable tags and this social capital thing might be a good addition to it. It might be possible to create a real community under an ownable tag, and the value of the community would grow if users could see more easily which one of them have the highest social capital. That kind of social capital would apply only for that group and outsiders wouldn't have chances to influence it.
There would be lots of different groups. Users could be members of several of them and have a separate social capital score for each of them. That might actually tell something useful about that person. And of course it would help communities to work better when everybody can see how much each member is liked and/or trusted.