I understand the appeal of a publishing platform that is owned by its users. I don't see how the Steem design leads there.
Right now content is rewarded because there is a lot of speculation in cryptocurrencies. Fine, that's probably no worse than using venture captial money. But I don't understand from my reading of the whitepaper, or my limited experience here, who wants to buy STEEM and for what purpose.
On Patreon, creators can lock content to backers (paying customers) or just ask for montly support. This provides a revenue source which I can understand. But upvotes on Steemit don't take currency from person X and give it to person Y; instead person X buys currency, which they keep, to get influence that might award person Y more when X upvotes them.
If STEEM is particularly good for e-commerce or other non-publishing uses, it seems inefficient to have those use cases subsidize the publishing use case.
If I run a STEEM node and act as a mirror, I don't get compensated based on traffic servered by my site, but at best indirectly by being chosen as a witness. I could run ads, I suppose, or charge creators to be visible on my site. But I don't actually need STEEM tokens to do this.
So I'm having trouble understanding how "real" money gets injected into STEEM, in order to be cashed out by artists and authors, in the long run. Is it a Patreon-style model where people buy more STEEM each month either to give directly or improve their influence? An ad-driven model in which publishers have to purchase STEEM for... something? A self-publishing model in which the front end charges for hosting, using STEEM?
It might be helpful to read about a simpler Proof-of-Stake system like the one ETH is working on before trying to grok Steem. Steem is really just Proof-of-Stake with a game built into it.
They do though. There's a third currency in play, rshares, that no one likes to tell you about. It's the one the voting system runs on. You get it from staking in the form of voting power, but your actions with it are restricted; all you can do with it is vote, decline to vote, or flag. When you vote the rshares are transferred to the person you voted on, and when post payouts happen they're forcibly converted to Steem and SBD.
People invest it in order to get their share of the staking rewards, and then either vote them or convert them to cash. Why does anyone buy a bond? I wouldn't necessarily argue if you thought the Steem blockchain deserved a junk rating but people buy those all the time too.
Alternate way of looking at it: Steem has gamified being on the internet, and people invest in the currency as a pay-to-win method. Since being on the internet is the most popular game in history by several orders of magnitude, if we can get people to notice it should do pretty well.