How do you assess the hurdles for people who, in order to come here en masse, have to get a simple as "idiot-friendly" access? From a marketing point of view, it is a killer to need a "user guide".
As long as a system doesn't invite even the last low-tech person, I don't think it has much chance of fast big growth, but rather remains a niche product for quite a while.
Another problem is those who, through early adaptation and participation, know the system inside out and are in any case superior to any newcomer who creates his or her media existence here with a single account. If you find out after a while that many people have multiple accounts here and that you can also buy in your power, it gives the impression that not everyone has the same starting conditions, which I think is more of a deterrent for the masses. Difficult to address this problem..
In the long term, the users will grow out of their technical infancy and the people of the future will probably have fewer problems with the technical refinements than the people of the present (if things don't change drastically in that respect).
So my comment ends in the usual way: It takes patience and goodwill to establish a platform in the long term. Any kind of negative publicity will therefore be looked upon rather disdainfully to the point of being damaging by those who see it that way.
I am rather stoic on this matter. I engage intensively in political debates at times and, on the other hand, I stay out of it enough not to demoralise myself.
There are designs to allow accounts to be created without people paying anything for the HP - such as account incubation. This can be done using existing logins for Web2.0 platforms too. This was all planned out when I went to Steemfest in Poland promoting SteemPassport, but the dApp designers of the day all wanted to 'win' and create their solution first - instead of working together. Steemit inc. ignored me and Ned fucked off after 15 minutes anyway as was planning his 'exit journey' from Steem anyway.
Bottom line is that solutions exist which would be best made open source, but currently they aren't available. Imo it makes sense to throw significant resources at this challenge and to manage it professionally right the way through. Having already started this on Steem I am not personally willing to invest more of my own time into repeating it on Hive without having guaranteed rewards for it. So unless that changes, it will be up to the biggest stakeholders to take action and only 3SPK and possibly the Splinterlands team are looking likely to do anything like that.
Resolving the problem of the gap of power between early adopters and new users requires a structure for education and creator support - similar to what Youtube provides but handled more by the grass roots. One challenge we face is that as soon as creators join forces, at present, they are accused by the 'curators' of doing so just to exploit 'their' reward pool.
We need an intelligent culture and not one based on power struggles, fear and control.
100% yes. This takes skills that developers and even plenty of investors tend to lack and that is part of the problem.
I don't know. Without being familiar with the technical aspects you mentioned in the first paragraph, I assumed the "dumbest user". In my experience, people jump on new platforms if they offer a super easy entry and anything beyond a few minutes is already a hurdle. That's why I was talking about a long development and life time for something like Hive or apps based on it to become established. The learning curve for the masses is slow to rise. To get back to the beginnings of YT, it took more than a decade for people who could not have imagined it twenty years ago to venture into uploading and posting videos. Camera and microphone technology did the rest. The applications have either become much easier or have been learned over the years. It seems to me that there is too much impatience overall with the growth of Hive. I may be wrong about that, but I think there is a grain of truth in it.
The people of POB or VyB seem to be taking a less polarising path here, and as I observe it, everyone is being talked to, which I take as a good sign. There are no direct attacks on others by the operators, which I think is a good strategy. Have you thought about joining there?