I think the miscommunication here is that you equate a voter education initiative proposal with a centralized approach to EOS referendum voting.
The only thing in this initiative that is centralized is the fact it is being proposed (not by me, I am actively fighting this) that only one account will be attached to the referendum contract, and that account will be in the hands of one person.
The very first referendum that will be listed (or so it is said) will be to hand the account over to a governing body who will handle the account, and this is the real problem afoot I keep talking about, and you keep talking about one UI proposal (among many) that will implemented.
Bringing together these use cases into an interface that explains what it is, why it is important for token holders to engage with it and activating them is a public good for the ecosystem and not the enemy of decentralization here.
You are arguing with the wrong person about the wrong issue. There is a much bigger threat at hand.
The real threat to DPoS based systems is and always has been voter apathy. While you sit back on your inflation rewards as a Steem witness, the sad reality is that the platform has fallen off in popularity significantly in the last year. It has become a haven for bots and whale cartels who are more focused on maximizing their stake than actually growing the platform.
The numbers don't lie...
What are you doing to fix this @lukestokes?
In case you haven't been paying attention, Bitshares and Steemit have failed miserably at educating the general public on how to actually take part in the system to affect any kind of significant change that could lead to improvements in larger adoption. I see EOS going down a similar road.
This is because the tools, resources and interfaces to engage with the system are scant and often difficult to use. My proposal addresses these hurdles for the average token holder and gives them a resource showing clearly how these different features work together, as many in the comments have said.
In my view "moving forward" is activating another 20-30% of smaller token holders to stake, vote and engage with important matters.
Things like increasing the number of paid standbys, amending the constitution, making arbitration a free market, enforcing the reg producer agreement, etc... so that the current discord we see in the majority of the community can "move forward" (for better or worse) out of this phase of confusion and bad press.
The outcome of those issues is not as important to me as much as that the liquid democracy we were building actually works and isn't dictated purely by those who have the most stake.
Activating and educating token holders is where all of the other DPoS systems have failed, and it was because they had engineers who could not design a bake sale flyer if their life depended on it leading usability and user research decisions they simply don't understand. Decentralization at all cost - even the very adoption that would make it work is just asinine any way you slice it. That's a view I do not agree with.
Now real UX people are showing up and pointing this stuff out, and just like you claim people new to DPoS don't understand decentralization, we are saying the incumbents don't understand the components of how to drive meaningful adoption.
As to "the numbers don't lie" let's be careful not to draw incorrect conclusions from correlations.
Search trends for cryptocurrency:
and bitcoin would fit the same graph:
I'll wager it has more to do with price than anything else.
Well, there is plenty of supporting data that shows Steemit has a spam problem, users have dropped off and are not engaged, etc... Associating that with a lull in the overall interest in crypto is equally subjective.
Many improvements have been made to the faucet since that post was published 6 months ago. That faucet is run by Steemit, inc as they pay for and manage new accounts created through Steemit.com.
As I said, Steemit.com is not STEEM. As a Steem witness, I'm not directly responsible for Steemit.com which is run by Steemit, inc. I'm responsible for the Steem blockchain. That said, I've put forth ideas which could help move things forward for both based on community priorities that don't currently line up with Steemit, inc.
On the topic of bad design decisions... also see the nested comments during this entire back and forth with @lukestokes. That's what UX people call a "clustefail". LOL