The whole steem project seems almost to be a social engineering experiment. Take for example the Steem White Paper (https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf), which interestingly appears to have been rewritten in August 2017 after Dan's departure as CTO. If you look under the "Voting on Distribution of Currency" heading, under the subheading of "Voting Abuse" you find this really stage "The Story of the Crab Bucket" that states the following:

A man was walking along the beach and saw another man fishing in the surf with a
bait bucket beside him. As he drew closer, he saw that the bait bucket had no lid and
had live crabs inside.
"Why don't you cover your bait bucket so the crabs won't escape?", he said.
"You don't understand.", the man replied, "If there is one crab in the bucket it would
surely crawl out very quickly. However, when there are many crabs in the bucket, if
one tries to crawl up the side, the others grab hold of it and pull it back down so that
it will share the same fate as the rest of them."
So it is with people. If one tries to do something different, get better grades, improve
herself, escape her environment, or dream big dreams, other people will try to drag
her back down to share their fate.

Then it states:

Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme
measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.

It sounds to me in many ways like social engineering and/or socialism where human jealousy and greed traps them into in a worst-case dog-eat-dog scenario.

And then there is the whole @Dan thing. @GuiltyParties told me it was Dan who nuked @BernieSanders to that -16 rep he has and he also told me other times that Dan has been doing a lot of downvotes on others too. So last night before leaving I did a search and found that to be true too, with posts just on Dan's downvotes. That puts a little doubt on his whole idea of making a sort of steem II on EOS that fixes the problems, if he starts abusing the same fault in the system that he so resonantly pointed out Ned and others were doing.

I recall Bill Ottman, co-founder of Minds, said several times in interviews how research has been done on such cases as that girl who felt cheated by YouTube and went into their offices shooting, which shows that mistreatment and abuse on social media platforms creates violent behavior. Thus, the bot wars and downvote wars of steemit.