I personally think Steem will go up in the long run, but one should diversify. A good account to have is Bitshares so that one can trade on a decentralized exchange. There are three coins (EOS is a token on the ERC20 protocol) that have solved the scaling issue (all done by Dan Larimer), which are EOS, Steem and Bitshares. When companies finally figure out that their smart contracts can't keep up (CryptoKitties slowed ETH to a crawl), they will jump ship into EOS. This is assuming sharding will not fix the problem and that network effect is minimized.

Steem will start to take off as SMT projects come to completion which will probably happen in the latter half of 2018. Bitshares is useful to trade between these two as that can happen using Blocktrades. Bitshares will probably only take off significantly when centralized exchanges and regulators start making serious threats. Bitshares cannot be shut down in the same way that Bitcoin can't be shut down. But centralized exchanges such as Coinbase have their days numbered.

I'm not sure what to think of upvote bots. I'm pretty sure that I would be nowhere without them even though my technical skills are on a par with some of the best programmers in this business (I've written my own planetary calculation algorithms based upon JPL data before switching to the Swiss Ephemeris). Many people talk, but few can do in the field that I worked in for so long (astrology). It's not easy keeping half a million lines of code straight in your head and still have a functioning program, but I still run into those who say they can do better and am still waiting for that to happen.

As such, I don't see whale status or rep score as being a good indicator for the value of one's posts. About the best one can hope for is to filter out some spam with these algols. But those who already made their money on banking fiat, can pour all their wealth into Steem and become a whale overnight and their values will be taken up by Steemit. Upvote bots represent centralization trying to reassert itself. So I upvote myself in the hopes that I might eventually be able to fix this platform before it gets away (assuming @ned wants it fixed) because a rep below 60 has no realistic chance of being listened to.

Network effect unfortunately has centralization tendencies so creating a new Steem blockchain that fixes these issues is not realistic unless it's done by someone with established cred in this field.

They didn't listen to Satoshi Nakamoto in the beginning either but because that code was open source, it made it unattractive for the thieves to try to steal (unlike my code which was heavily sought after between 2005 - 2010) by the top names in the business (astrology.com, alabe.com, Cosmic Patterns, etc). Your ideas will be lifted if you're a "no name" and claimed by someone else as their own. Satoshi managed to avoid that fate by open sourcing in a provable way (blockchain consensus).

One more problem is that optimally Steemit encourages about 4 posts per day to achieve optimal success. This is what you have to do if you're not already established. The problem is that posting this many times a day is not conducive to serious and well considered thought. There's no game theoretical incentive to post less often and do a better job. I've felt this limitation in my own blog because posting once a day is about what's necessary to not lose following if you're not established. The quality of my posts suffer because of it. But then again, if I really got into the technical details of explaining why I think the way I do, many people would be lost fairly quickly. My next post will be on quantum mechanics and will probably illustrate my point.