Good analogy, yes.
Those teen years can be important... choices made lay the groundwork for whether we go on to be dropouts in a street gang or astrophysicists.
What will the consensus look like? Can we make most of the people mostly happy, most of the time? What will our objective be? How will we arrive at consensus?
We arrive at consensus in my opinion, by doing what we are doing. People need to get more comfortable with upvoting and downvoting and making sure they are using their influence via witness voting.
We fight, talk, listen, change views and trudge forward.
I am not sure I think that SteemIt or other social media sites on the blockchain will become competitive with Facebook. I am also not sure we have to in order to build a solid community.
I'm not sure we can ever become competitive with Facebook, either. And I'm not sure we want to, quite frankly. But we could become a strong venue for free thinkers and those looking for something more substantial than the "social soup" served up elsewhere.
Some of the old social blog sites I used to be on had 5 to maybe 30 million users. That would be a substantial community.