The way I see it steem has to provide something to the outside world in order to hold or gain any value. Or if it's entirely inclusive to itself it has to build a multifaceted economy tied to and providing to survival of it's members. Without one of these it will collapse on itself due to it's own uselessness. No investor will invest in it, and all users will withdrawal their valueless funds. The steem networks main assets are tools to transfer value, and a way to store and distribute data in a moderately "uncensorable" fashion. Steem isn't the best at any of these individually, but it provides something unique by combining these attributes. I see steem as a publishing platform first and it's currency as secondary. Why? because it's less secure, and more volatile than any of the other cryptocurrency out there. Even it's "stablecoin" went from hanging out at $20 for some reason to $.70 recently. Nobody really buys anything with steem, the only reason you would hold onto it is to speculate or to hold more Steem Power to increase your VOTE. My post is to talk about the usefulness of voting if it is only used to increase your own position in the network which is what many whales users of all types are doing. Sure some whales are incentivised to buy stake in steem to upvote themselves, which temporarily increases the price in steem, but what i'm trying to point out is that is isn't net neutral, it's a net negative, it's unsustainable and over time it drives the value of the network and the price of steem down.
Steem dropped a lot more than other currencies. It's value was up due to it's close relationship with bitcoin and the speculation surrounding these networks, but there was a quiet inflation happening the whole time. So when it dropped, it dropped even harder than other currencies.
A decentralized publishing platform which aims to pay people can be way more unified, efficient of higher quality and more productive. Steem is the wild west, and I get the attraction of "freedom" but i guarantee that this system will get more organized and start zapping the leeches on the system or it will perish, fizzle out.