Steemit may have been designed to die as part of the birth pains of a platform we are yet to see.

I think that's giving people too much credit. At least too much foresight.

Now, I would totally believe that the original idea was "let's create a thing where people think they can get rich, but only implement halfway and expect other people to put in the real work where the problems are, which will then vastly inflate our self-created horde of tokens, and we can ride on the coattails of other, better, developers." That I would believe.

But I may be a cynic.

Any attention is pointedly not good attention. Not if you actually care about the ecosystem. Which you may not, I would hate to impart any sort of judgment of that kind.

If people show up looking to invest purely so they can spam at us, that doesn't help us. It definitely doesn't help attract new users. In fact, it strangles the golden goose. Encouraging that strangling to happen faster and more efficiently is not particularly good if you expect to ride that goes for any period of time.

That is a violently self-destructive position to take.

In this case, "no behavior" would be far superior to the behavior that we see a handful of whales engaging in. I really don't care what they do behind the scenes; selling their SP, renting out the bots, running self-promotion cycles – I just don't care. What I care about is when they end up polluting the posted content to the blockchain, because it acts as an active repellent to getting more people who actually want to use a social network as a social network involved.

Those are the people you want. Where they go, people who want to invest in their presence go, no matter whether those investors are shady or not. Step one, get normal, sane, social media active people in place.

You want more investment? That is how you get it. And that's how you keep it. Anything else is delusion of the most toxic ray sublime.