Great post! It puts everything in perspective. And to be honest, I haven't thought about this perspective before, printing press, social media, and Steemit. This makes sense.

Was Steem/Steemit successful in achieving this goal?

It's a good step towards the right direction. That's for sure. But still a lot has to be done.

I think Steemit has to take some good aspects of "traditional" social media, such as serving relevant content to users, using machine learning. YouTube and Medium are doing a great job on that.

Is Steem really more decentralized than YouTube and Facebook?

I think so. There are at least more than one whale.

What about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia was indeed the first example of this movement. As a result, it got banned in some countries. Steemit has some advantages over Wikipedia, because of the inclusion of the financial aspect. That financial aspect has its disadvantages too. I think that would be a topic of a post that I'd like to write soon.

Great post! Resteemed.