My suggestions:
1. Scalability. Need to think about sharding. Content could be sharded by tag or topic. Imagine a withness who listens and displays only a few tags and maintain a list with who listens to others. Then we could achieve horisontal scalability without sacrificing decentralization.The currency distribution is harder to scale but we all need to think this out fast. Anyway, it would be wise to think how much load could generate 1 million active users and how nodes could handle it.
2. Simplified frontend Following latest block from russian communication agency we could understand that the time to our blocking from oppresive regimes is running short. The good news is that any steemit full node has all the information about our network, posts and votes. So, theoretically any node or witness could run his or her frontend of steem. We just need to provide a tool for it.
So, simplified open frontend that could easily be installed right next to a full node is a thing we should discuss.
3. Social efforts
We should start to work for audidience growth. I see a few points of growth here, e.g.:
- mining / crypto businesses who could use the platform for ads and social media efforts. We could even provide a helpdesk-support style services based on steem platform.
- streamers / youtube ppl. Youtube had a few moves which dissapointed many professional and semi-professional content-makers. Like automatic demonetization. Twitch has thefty commisions policy. We have great video services - DTube, DLive and they could provide larger benefits for streamers and content makers. And we get their audience.
4. Budget
One could not underestimate the ability to earn financial support for their steem-bound efforts and servises. We should have the ability to generate and fairly distribute budgets for them. You could see this post for all the details.
5. Encourage minnows
Steemit (and other whales) could delegate part of their steem power to valuable content creators. This could be done with help of curators guilds and cost almost no human resources from teemit and whales themselves. Now, minnow has no incentive to participate after a month when he or she realise that rewards here are not for them.