What Im realizing is steem should really be described as a content market economy. It also has a sort of anarchist investor co-op thing going on.

Steem is growing by investors shaping the cost and reward of "rent" on the system. This takes place through inflation brought on by the reward pool and witness rewards. Organizations like @utopian-io shape delegations towards interesting open source projects. This is a really healthy exciting platform because it shows how automated economies can be self healing, self evolving, and all around self-perpetuated.

There aren't many repercussions for people acting extremely selfishly however. @velimir is an interesting one. I think his self upvotes through adsactly are bad for the platform, but @adsactly seems to fund some good stuff for the platform, like @steem-plus (which is a fantastic tool that everyone should check out, for anyone who uses reddit, it's like RES). Although adsactly seems like his operation, it brands itself as being a group of people, haven't quite figured them out yet. Right now as long as big whales are using their power to build good tools for steem, there arent many on the platform that can or will do anything about it. Especially if their posting and voting behavior if is otherwise following the rules. I think this is of the belief that because of bots and anonymous secondary accounts, it becomes impossible to enforce any rules about self voting, so it has becomes a tolerated practice for all, instead of slapping on the wrist only those who make it obvious. I've come to see this as a good thing, but it is a flawed system. I believe SMTs will address much of this issue, but I dont follow development on that as much as I should.

Id love it if @velimir chimed in on this but he and I might have started off on the wrong foot.