"Introducing the man, the legen... wait, no just the man"

Hello steemers,

I'm Fanf, currently a french student in Economics (mostly digital, mostly web-marketing, mostly web-analytics,...) doing an internship to get my degree. Actually my internship has few to do with the digital economy. It's more about telecom, a few notions here and there of economics, and some law stuff I've never seen before to top it off.

I basically help counties (and sometime cities) building optic fiber's network to give high speed Internet to everyone (and not just the ones that are living in big cities).

And I'm glad to do so, because otherwise the internship I could qualify to would be tracking people with cookies, analyzing their behaviors, trying to make them buy a new LCD screen or whatever (which can be fun, no doubt, but doesn't attract me that much).

I spent most of my life in Rennes, Britain (not the great one, the little one). The only thing original is that we have a street proudly known as "Street of thirst", which is a pedestrian street, 100m long, full of bars and pubs on both sides. Quite a good spot to spend a night with some friends, if you're ok being surrounded with dozens of drunk people.
I spent a year abroad (Hello dear Canada, hello sweet Montréal !), which was quite instructive, but not on what I expected.
Now I'm living in Paris, in a 1 piece appartment, earing the noises of the night in one fucking big city.

I came here because a friend talk to me about it, and it made me curious (and a bit greedy, let's admit it).

I've been lurking 4chan for 6 or 7 years and, as the quality decreases, I spent less and less time on it. I switch to reddit a year ago, and it's quite entertaining, but it ain't the same thing.

And now, Steem comes right around the corner !

And it's quite interesting. But quite paradoxal from my point of view. So to finish my presentation, I will just ask the newbie questions that crossed my mind and that I can't really figure out. So if anyone has a answer, I'll take it !

First of all, I don't know shit about crypto-currencies. But it seems to be usually put in place with a libertarian kind of logic behind (get rid of the known financial actors, the system work itself out, no one can take credit for the work of others, everything is crypted, that kind of things). But I wonder if Steem, beyond the use of crypto-currency, is aiming at the same libertarian spirit as a whole. Or if it's just a way of control over what people post (self regulation : in order to gain more, you post stuff which speaks to the most, consensual stuff, like... you know, tits and kittens).
Secondly, if the goal is to create quality content, then does the financial gain have a negative impact on it ? Like, if Steem gains a wide popularity, and hundred of thousands discover it and go on it and start posting, how do you regulate the few (or the numerous) who tries doing "trendy" posts, just to get some buckets (again, tits and kittens) ? Maybe the whole "whales" thing enter to play here as they have more power if I correctly understood (which very well may not be the case), but then you have arbitrary moderation basically.

So yeah, mostly, I wonder how you keep the quality posting, the libertarian spirit and the financial gain all in the same time.

So here I am, still skeptic, but still curious too.
And quite interested to do some data analysis If I have the time and find a way to get those datas (nothing fancy, I'm not a big shot).

Thanks for the reading (for the brave ones that finished it), sorry for my poor writing skills and see you around ;)

TLDR : french student, trying to guess where Steem is going