Hey, @janton.
Good question. I don't know if I can really answer that.
They may have traded one problem for another.
The ability to sign up people quickly existed before. Remember all of the thousands if not tens of thousands that were coming in around December to March or so 2017-2018? I believe that's when most of the 1-plus million accounts came in. Don't quote me, but I know there was quite a rush because of the value increase during that period.
The problem isn't strictly onboarding. It slows down in the screening, and from what I remember, whatever auto mechanism they had in place for checking for whatever they do wasn't working. It was still letting in, for instance, an army of bad actors. So, they went to manually processing new accounts, which slowed the process way down.
Supposedly, though, they came up with a new automated onboarding mechanism. That's what HF 20 was principally about, until it wasn't. It was called Velocity, remember? That referred to increasing the speed by which screened accounts could go from application to approval. However, everyone got bogged down in RCs, and from there, it's been more about using RCs to claim accounts that can then be opened.
So, I don't know. I think, at the very least, there's a mixture of things happening to STEEM and new accounts. One is the RC deal. Another is the so called crypto winter or bear market in general. Another is that less people know about STEEM than know about Bitcoin or another alt coins. The last is those who know about STEEM, know mostly about the negatives, from its inception to now, even though a lot of good things have happened, too.
Howdy today sir Glen! Well I'm no tech guy or programmer but the problems seem very difficult..or maybe they just look like that to me. Like the downvoting system they have which has scared so many away from Steemit.
I just hope the people running things are very skilled and gifted but I hear people saying that the people running things are clueless. lol.
I can see the social site aspect of Steem growing and being a success but whether that will rise the price of Steem significantly is the big question.
Hey, @janton.
I think there is some skill for sure when it comes to coding. The question is, do they know about social media. There is a game aspect to all of this, and so far, I haven't seen as much of that as there's been attempts to resolve problems. The EIP is supposed to help incentivize upper SP to curate rather than find other ways to earn ROI. I think that's been happening to a greater degree than I expected, but how long it will last, who knows.
I don't downvote, but I recognize that quite a few people think it's necessary to keep things from falling apart. It might be if the downvotes were used more as a deterrent to bad behavior, rather than throwing tantrums or revenge voting. Not sure how you mitigate the latter and accentuate the former, but were still early into the EIP, so who knows.
I'm not sure STEEM's future lies in the social media side, unless some folks show up and produce the next big thing (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), rather than cloning what exists.
Basing things on Reddit is not a good idea in my opinion, but that's what a lot of the devs consider to be social media. Throw out some info, get some likes, dislikes, and if it's contentious (or even if it's not) have at it. Might work for them, but I don't think outside of the 18-35 male demo, it plays very well.
It all comes down to "wait and see what happens" just like it's been since I joined! lol.