For some time I've witnessed token economies come and go. I believe it's important to learn from our past to not repeat previous mistakes. Bitconnect took a lot of people inside Steem's money. It had a centralized governance structure, mainly built as a marketing machine with no product. Steem shows us another governance structure can exist that is extremely decentralized. Although, I have found one flaw with every Cryptocurrency project in existence that becomes critical at large-scale, the centralized code repositories, usually Github. (See Facebook Libra's repo to understand why centralized repo's are ineffective at scale. )
Ants seem to have mastered collaboration
Steemit as a company possesses world-class talent, I believe surpassing Google, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of censorship tech media. For the last 3 years the centralized Github repo issue caused many failures, flaws, and roadblocks to our success but the centralization didn't create any nuclear situations , just a slow degradation of user base and user experiences over time. Today the coin is down over 30% from its initial offerings. We lost on average 10% of our market cap each year even during one of the largest modern bull cycles. Why is this? Is it inflation? Is it centralization? What factors do the whales not like about Steem?
I can only give my opinion and what I've heard from whales and investors outside of Steem. They love bitcoin because it has fully decentralized wallet applications (true DApps) and these whales see a huge value in having ledgers storing the "blocks" in many locations ran by different people(Bitcoin's 10,000 nodes vs Steem's 125). Steem's front ends (that most people use) are using extremely dated web-app technology (this adds zero nodes to our count against bitcoin). While this model worked well to initially to gain users, this model is no good for the end goal and getting real investors with Bitcoin to buy Steem. Companies love to build with HTTP (client-server model) because it's easy to code and gives them a lot of control to shove tracking and advertising down users throats without them having much say or even no say at all in the matter (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
I believe by decentralizing our Repo's and implanting a form of direct democracy into Steem's code, developers will work together in new and seamless ways to create innovative and disruptive products. I believe building out our Code Democracy helps every Steemian and many projects or possibly even governments, many things that we can't even imagine yet.
Democracy : :(uncountable) Rule by the people, especially as a form of government; either directly or through elected representatives (representative democracy).