Hi @kaliju, like you said I think it is mostly up to us creators to produce the content that will bring people on the site. Of course we can wait for developers to make games and new front ends, but the content is what make people stay.
You also mentioned written content gets more engagement. I didn't realise it before but I think you might be right!
It's a challenge for sure but, what will improve this platform is us creators putting out valuable content and constantly creating engagement. Sparking interest for people who might not have an account yet.
Another thing that helps is educating your readers about the benefits of Steem. The question now is how should we go about convincing readers they need to get a Steem account?
Ultimately, I think Steem had given an impression of blog for a living to people. I did regularly back link my posts to Facebook when I started. It's amazing the response from "outsider" had increased by many fold. What came in later was a total disaster where people start to view this as a gold digging machine. Everybody sign up an account and posting generic stuff in the hope to get upvotes. Pretty soon, the crowd died down, and I start to hear something like those who make it in Steemit simply because they have a whale friend supporting them. It's time wasting to earn dusts.
At some point I agree with you, it's entirely about what a blogger wanted to create and how that can help to bring up awareness to others. I've seen good writers wrote amazing piece, and ended up 0.06 payout. Let's see how can we turn that around.
You bring up a very good point here. One of the biggest issues with the steem echosystem right now is that there is more creators than users who are here to consume content. What happens is you end up having an insane amount of low quality content being posted everyday, burrying the good ones in the process.
If there was more influencial creators on the platform to bring in a huge following, that would certainly fix part of the problem. But still I'm curious to hear what people think should be done to change the way the public perceives the platform. After all you can't decide how the general public is going to use it. So the best we/they can do is come up with ways to promote a healthy echosystem and something that's viable long term.
Pardon my negativity, but I'm one of those whiner who liked to stir shit up. In my opinion, we just gotta get used to low expectation. I have learned to live with low payout and sometimes when I share something does not belong to myself, I would hit the decline payout button. Any social media platform that pays, would be heavily swamp with abuser trying to cut an easy way out. We seen enough circle jerker around, what left here are mostly some small time community to help supporting the smaller pond of plankton. Even that, got heavily abused by new comer. In the end, it's about delegate to the team, the team go stronger and return you a bigger upvote. That's all about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm just saying even a small community support is still an effort. But we can't deny that it's a smaller scale version of circle jerking.