You are right, the economics of these platforms are broken. They are broken from a social and incentive point of view like you pointed to in your above post and they are broken from a technical and economics point of view.

I think the promise of a decentralized platform like Steem was that the media companies like Facebook and Twitter were taking our information and selling it and the user wasn't getting anything out of it. Steem was supposed to be different in that the users would get paid to post, comment, and vote.

The problem is that the staking mechanism allows people who have a lot of money to come in and buy a lot of STEEM and convert it to Steem Power and then just post and upvote garbage and use that as a mechanism for taking the largest share of rewards for themselves. It seems like the staking mechanism for a lot of these platforms tend to concentrate wealth and that is not that different from the world that these decentralized platforms promised to leave behind.

Way back in the day Google updated their algorithm to stop content farming. Now all of that content farming has just moved onto these platforms like Steem and Hive.