@craig-grant
So far I have found steamit to be restrictive. I think it needs to be more flexible. People want to be able to drop and drag pictures and videos into their posts with ease. Using all the markup is nerd speak. If this is supposed to be a free platform, which I'm not sure if the true intent or not. Then it would make sense for me to easily be able to post videos that are not hosted on YouTube, which in my opinion is the pinnacle of free speech centralization.
I'm not sure if steemit is currently being censored, but I think it would be a good idea to let it grow organically for a while. Just to see who the audience really is and what types of things they are really into. I haven't been here long enough to truly judge but as of right now I think I'm starting to like the community. I haven't seen as much negativity as I see on some of the other social sites.
Like I said my only problem is the difficulty in posting pictures and videos. To be completely honest, I don't think most people will really care about how much steemit they earn, because financially most people aren't there yet. I do believe though, that the game modification aspect of up voting people's posts for real money, will really raise a few eyebrows over the next five or six years. If you compound that with the growth of Bitcoin and crypto-currency in general over the next five years steemit's odds of success seem very high.