Aye, sometimes it seems that disengagement works best for these sorts of situations to solve thmselves, allowing the swarm to come to the conclusion that IT is making those payouts happen and falling for the invitation to war without quite realizing it. And the more the swarm has to divide and take sides the more the egos involved will get nurtured feeling part of some kind of holy crusade.
Speaking of disengagement: The thing I can't quite disengage from is at a whole other level. Raping the reward pool due to the greed of one's followers is one thing... actively censoring politically incorrect or academically unwanted evidence-based contemporary journalism is quite another, and it concerns me deeply. Especially the apparent lack of interest in it by those who could decidedly help to make it public and help force a statement or an official explanation instead of consenting through silence.
Especially when the people involved are at the higher echelons of the Steemit Inc ivory tower, blatanly disregarding any publicly confessed standards this platform supposedly stands for., or addressing the repeated calls to back up their claims and actions with any sort of tangible reasoning.
There the real danger can be found here, it's the best candidate for a case AGAINST steemit at the moment, to me.
Users are users, and that's bad enough as you nailed in your two parts here. But actively circumcizing solid polticial debate while simultaneously holding influential core positions in this ecosystem and the development team is a whole other dimension of "worrysome" to me, and seems way more urgent in light of what I have witnessed than a possibly false prophet and his unaware flock.
Many challenges with this platform, in spite of how many people think “decentralization” is the holy grail...