i'm actively following the daily stats posted from arcange to temper the optimism/hype discussed within steemit... clearly the growth spike around August is what served to spark the general optimism for the platform as a concept at scale, but upon critical analysis of the numbers we see here it's important to compare the true numbers of the active users with community/brand/site traffic one might see for a focused subject/purpose.
With that in mind, I would lean towards favoring such optimism of the community: if it were surrounding a more specific subject/purpose like art, education or news, but with such a broad and unguided platform design the numbers are quite unremarkable except for the minor footnote of the first definable traction point in august.
For example, I launched a video site in 2005 right around the same time as YouTube and within the first month, and just two promotional videos, I attracted the unique/active user numbers that steem took a year of organic growth to only just recently spark-up to that level of traffic. Admittedly, I doubt my user-registration and comment/content-contribution metrics matched that of steem today, but I didnt build the site for crowdsourcing (it was more of a brand/channel/magazine for interesting videos found dispersed around the internet at the time). With that in mind, steem's strength in genuine 'membership' will be both its competitive advantage and ultimate downfall if the system mechanics don't scale to ensure crowdsourced-leadership. I'm all for opening the web and the power systems of the world, but there's an equally valid philosophy for not allowing pure democracy in organizations... the communication costs are simply too high and genuine dedication spread too thin for effective leadership to spontaneously occur... it'll be interesting how this discussion will evolve in terms of creating moderators or special-privileges to maintain the broad set of tags/topics this platform wishes to foster for the future.
At the end of the day, for steem to succeed, or simply sustain its recent attention, there will be lots of work/contribution needed from community to foster and further the value-mechanics of the vision as compared to what I feel everyone is currently feeling the frustration in growth spawned by those promoting the platform purely around profiteering over the core meritocracy reward system intended for content.