We've seen that the powers that be here really do not seem to care about user acquisition and retention, which is an absolutely key component of any freemium model.
Who doesn't care about user acquisition and retention? Steemit.com? If that is your answer, you are correct. They do not care. Nor do they care about their UI. @andrarchy reaffirmed that clearly. They are completely focused upon the blockchain and feel that is where their resources are best suited. Some might disagree but that is their viewpoint.
That said, do you think the people behind @steemhunt care about what you mention? @dtube? @busy.org? @actifit? I bet they do. The application developers are the ones who care because they are the ones who are the business owners.
And now with the ability to onboard their own users, they can drive traffic to their sites (hence here).
Plus the lecturing about "who pays their fair share" that accompanied RCs is a direct contradiction. In a freemium model everyone knows and accepts that the paying users are covering the costs.
Pretty hard to be a contradiction when that is what is happening here. If someone signs up new and lets say they get 5 posts, 10 upvotes, or 15 transactions per day. Who is covering that cost? By the way, who covered the cost for that person to sign up? Someone had to.
Now multiply that over 1M times for people who want to post a blog or two a day. Isn't that exactly what you described?
Exactly. It really should be up to each app to develop a business model for themselves. Network resources do not come for free and developing them is the province of Steemit Inc. If some app chooses to be ad powered and is successful, then that is precisely their own business and should not concern Steemit Inc or anyone else. We stakeholders own the infrastructure. That's all.
If facebook had required users to pay to post more than 1 or 2 cat photos a day, I suspect most of us would never have heard of facebook and that it would have gone the route of myspace. It may not be fair, but the reality is that Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. are the norm, and the norm is not two posts (including comments) per day, which is what a 15 SP account gets at this point. Add the byzantine rules on Steem and the lack of "friends" and you have a platform that is not all that attractive to new casual users who are not crypto or economic-experimentation geeks. Some time ago, I recall that a daughter of a Google Plus employee, when asked by her dad to use Google Plus replied by saying something like "Dad, social means where the people are, and the people are on Facebook."
The question is whether the application developers can mask the problems with Steem caused by the extreme proof of stake hierarchy, RCs, and the byzantine voting rules. If they can, things may work out, but if not, Steem can always hard fork again to try to address the issues.
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