Critical Analysis of Steem and Why I'm Invested

Steem is one of the only cryptoassets I am holding for the long-term (not trading). That likely sets alarms off for many of you (as I promote Steemit in all my videos), so fair disclosure that there IS an economic incentive for me to boost the price of Steem so I get paid more for posting my content on Steemit. However, I am NOT being paid by Steemit or anyone else to make this video - I am doing it of my own accord.

First, this video explores some of the many flaws associated with Steem and its biggest application, Steemit. In summary, we discuss:

The "instamine" by developers and relaunch of Steem blockchain at beginning so that developers received 80% of Steem supply in beginning for "development purposes"
The issues associated with trending posts on Steemit - The lack of integrity in buying votes or whales colluding to upvote posts for reasons other than curation (e.g: a friend made the post)
The fact that all of the money comes from investors, which makes payouts extremely volatile and, in a way, makes the business model seem Ponzi Scheme-like as money is created from 'thin air' (wish I explored this more - one of the downsides of not writing a script is not spending enough time on certain topics)
Reward Pool Abuse
Whether or not delegated Proof of Stake is corruptible (briefly, don't go into detail here)
The quality of most posts (at least in trending) is rather poor. In my opinion, which I didn't share in the video, payments should be proportionate to quality and # of views which at this time, there is a massive disconnect which means tons of value is being destroyed.
Flaws I Didn't Discuss (Mostly due to constraints or forgetting while recording):

Inadequate policing tools or incentives available for reducing the frequency of low quality submissions
How complex Steemit feels to a new user
How frustrating the account creation process can be (although this is being worked on)
After we go through the flaws, I discuss why I hold Steem for the long-term:

It's the only cryptoasset with an application that sees real use, as verifiable through Alexa & SimilarWeb
There is a culture in Steemit, as you can easily see with community discussions and "wars" over particular topics (e.g: Haejin, voting bots, etc.)
It "feels" active - A lot of crypto projects "feel" dead due to low number of overall users. While trending may not be filled with high quality posts, it certainly has a lot of interaction which brings people back to the platform
There is a team actively working on improving the platform and the witnesses are generally doing their best to make it a better place as well (a fact I forgot to mention in video)
There are community members who are actively hard at work to improve the platform and Steem ecosystem (forgot to mention in video)
Overall, while Steem & the application Steemit have many concerns, it is my opinion that Steem is the closest to achieving its goal among almost all cryptoassets. I am hoping that the issues I have discussed will be addressable in the long-term and am willing to take the risk personally.

In the future, I might write an article that goes more in-depth on my opinions of Steem - this is more of an overview. Thanks for watching / reading.