Disagree.
All social network value propositions are basically the same: to generate value through brokering connections between sellers and buyers. They are communication markets. You pay with time, effort, money, attention, or social capital to connect with others and trade resources; Circle-jerks do the opposite. They isolate a small group, and polarize ideas because circle-jerk is just another word for groupthink. Just like in "nature" ideas can change and adapt, ideas people are willing to pay for tend to closely match reality. Unfortunately, groupthink is well-known for creating ideas that diverge from reality with detrimental consequences.
People get off on them, but circle-jerks aren't valuable. I'm not a content marketing genius, I'm just an American pleb that believes it when economists say ideas create value, but not all ideas.
"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come." -Victor Hugo
Why? Because they motivate people to work. The whole question of whether or not Steem is ahead of its time could just as well be asked another way: How motivated are you to deeply engage with other people on Steem. Conversely, how willing are we to fit a circle-jerk into each of our individual lifestyles? I doubt a many people would say circle-jerks play an integral role in their life. But who knows, maybe the comments section will prove me wrong.
"In general, large-scale unidirectional e-mails have little value when analyzing one-on-one interaction. Therefore, we only consider reciprocated e-mails when examining relationships between individuals." - Science
My point is, ecosystems sustain value through perpetual growth and decay. Social interaction is not one sided. It is interactive, but not exclusive to people. Sure, rampant content-curation bots could foster a huge amount of valuable content and make someone a lot of money, and they're still doing (arguably) valuable work. But Bots can't outperform people in the one place that matters, conversation.
Every complex system has parasites. In code they could be memory leaks, in cats they could be heartworms, in daily productivity they could be co-workers or funny cat gifs. Bots may or may not add value but some here would agree they are used by parasites. Circle-jerks on Steem don't foster any new ideas and must, therefore die or consume the host's valuable resources, leading to sickness (weaker valuations of Steem) just like any other parasite.
The cure is disagreement. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
