I bet people will figure out that it is not the content that is valuable but the source of vote that is. That's probably when things will start to break down. Hopefully, Steemit, Inc. and popular other interfaces find workarounds to this issue that minimize their impact to the content that they serve up. Because people are not going to want to come over if the content is orders of magnitude more mediocre.
But there are other social experiments being prepared using other blockchains and this blockchain can certainly learn from its mistakes, so there's hope for the initial innovation discovered here to live up to its potential.
Please share other alternatives and upcoming projects. Would really love to give them a try