I think Steemit is great. It has problems, but all new things have problems. Its problems, also, unlike that of the big data sites, are solvable.

Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, are too often playing by the rules Mancur Olsen, long ago, in his first book, predicted actors seeking political influence will play. Therefore they cannot be trusted to behave in relation to their users in any generally trustworthy way.

A user, for them, is, first of all, just a node that increases or decreases their valuation, not a consumer to whom they provide a service. The user isn't paying.

That was originally the whole point — the user isn't paying. But that, many like Carl Hewitt now admit, was the great slippery slope and failure of the business model where users and their data are themselves the payment companies take in exchange for service.

Some gentlemen in consumer science departments wanted software and computer service to be a free utility and passed on the idea to their students.

Their students created the big data sites, and saw the path to get rich was to sell out their users, of course, and the surveillance communities coopted the business model, and the political and institutional players got into these games. Those roads merged into the avenue along which, today, travels our society.

``Starve the Leviathan'' — agreed!