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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