You are all making too much out of who gets upvoted and who doesn't. The total posting and voting rewards are only about 6.9% of the market cap per year and dropping every year. Yes the rewarding scheme is useful to try to attract and retain users, and to the extent that it is successful in attracting some users that is perfectly okay. Even if it is only a few (semi) famous people who have a following and get votes, even thats perfectly okay, since it gets exposure and followers on to the platform too.
Most of the market cap (i.e. the other 93.1%) simply comes from the fact that is a decent crypto with a reliable code base, active development, a good size user base probably bigger than all but <5 others, nice functionality in terms of 3 second blocks, decent scalability, zero transaction fees, a somewhat-functional pegged stable coin, etc. It doesn't come from giving away a small amount of coins, and it won't go to zero because those coins aren't being given out to the users you think they should be given out to.
The question is why would people buy Steem? The price value comes from the fact that there are buyers.
Most of it now is speculation, anticipation of future value, which can be quite good for a big Social Media platform of the kind of Steemit that is totally new with totally innovative features, and of course censorship resistance...
Later the speculation activity will be replaced by real value generation, I can easily see some marketplace being setup where Steem is the currency. It's a perfect currency, it's a little bit inflationary, and it has 0 fees. So it's just like a fiat money but without fees and electronic. I mean just this alone can make Visa and Mastercard cry.
So speculators today anticipate this future, as am I. What will happen, I don't know. The blockchain tech is definitely scaleable, I think Dan said that it can hold like 5000 tx/s which is like Reddit level size, and Steemit is nowhere near Reddit size now.
So probably Reddit is the first biggest competitor to Steemit right now. Once Steemit.com get's enriched with other features, then we will go after Facebook.
It will be an interesting journey, FB took like 5 years to become to a decent size. Steemit is at it's 2nd year now.