Steemit is still tiny. A lot of those million accounts are fake despite Steemit supposedly checking them. I suspect a lot of people give up when they don't make anything, but then they use other sites for no reward. There has to be a compelling experience and that may be lacking. The trending page is largely junk as they are effectively promoted posts. In some cases they may be worthy, but some just do it for the money and to possibly gain followers. It's all a big experiment in new businesses.
Certain people are driving away good creators as part of their flagging war. That doesn't help matters.
On the plus side we have so these 'dapps' for images, videos and audio. It's a great playground for the creative and there's that potential for rewards.
I'll keep on voting up the good stuff and helping worthy causes. I still believe this platform can do great things, but it's not guaranteed to succeed.
Very valuable thoughts, @steevc - thank you!
What Steem needs is a redesign. We should have a better control on what's trending / visible / important and what is not. Currently the best exposure in the network can be simply bought. It's as if one could buy the no. 1 headline in a newspaper. These spaces should be reserved for content that was considered valuable by a large majority of the community. The evaluation process of content is completely corrupted now.
That's why Bloomberg asks what the CEO is planning to do in order to improve the content quality on Steem. That's why Steem has such a negative image now.
The more we talk about it, the merrier.
I still hope that @ned doesn't plan to completely abandon Steemit.com.