Under the Steem model, one person with significant stake can significantly impact the user experience of everyone else. I think Dan saw this problem and tried to address it in various ways with flag wars and such, but ultimately it's a reputation and identity issue combined with a token (or power/value) distribution problem.

There are no perfect solutions. PoW has issues with centralized hashing power. DPoS has issues with token voting collusion or just "the rich get richer" problem. Ultimately it comes down to how willing we are as a species to cooperate. If we can't do that, we will not have freedom and voluntary interactions.