"...Steem has gone the communist route with an obvious single controlling entity, while Hive has gone the democracy route..."
Both the Steem and Hive systems seem to me to each have elements of democracy as well as communism. Steem is also a fairly ready example of an autocracy after the hostile takeover. In either case they're mechanics are virtually the same at this point, save for that Justin Sun metagamed the system with Steem as far as I can tell.
They are both like communism in that they offer a publicly owned resource. The blockchain can even be looked at as a means of production with which any of us can work (blog, curate, or support the network) to produce goods (valuable crypto tokens), in a simplified sense. They differ from communism in that they include money. Also witnesses are arguably a protocol imposed social class, and there's also that fish metaphor from plankton to whale which gives a whole zoo of different social strata.
Still, they have elements of democracy. There is voting implemented through multiple levels of the system. Here there are both elements of direct democracy and representative democracy, which I find interesting. However, there is the so-called 'iron law of oligarchy' which holds that democracy inevitably implies de facto oligarchy. Also votes don't have some intrinsic egalitarian value here, as they do in most governmental voting schemes. Instead the vote is proportional to how rich someone is; more money more votes. I'm not terribly fond of that last bit myself.
Justin Sun turned Steem into something of an autocracy with the hostile takeover. Now he has personal unchecked supreme power. I hear that the top 20 Steem witnesses are his sock puppets. If so he puts almost every new block into the chain. He decides who to censor for whatever reason, and has circumvented normal popular controls on his authority.
It's sad really, in my opinion.
I always had a deep suspicion of him, at least now I have a reason for it.
Can't disagree with any of those points.
I often think it's a good experiment in whether true decentralisation can ever be achieved. It seems every implemented system has loopholes for exploitation. The problem with one account one vote on Steem or Hive is that this is too easily exploited through extra account creations. Not that it helps in the real world, where choice is pretty much just an illusion too.