My comments about this might not be very appreciated because it will sound negative, but I think OP wants constructive criticism and I'm trying my best to deliver.
I literally just started using this today and noticed a few things.
And this is the biggest one - The quality of content isn't the best. I noticed quite a few posts that are like 2 lines. Not sure why anyone would post something like that with no value. It just takes up valuable "real estate" on the pages. If content quality isn't that great, any person who may have thought about creating an account would be turned off very quickly.
Solution? I really don't know. I'm new to all of this. Off the top of my head, we need a better system to suppress useless content like that and highlight good content. But then again, that might not be possible. Google and Youtube, and every other community website had a lot of crappy content in the beginning too, so it might be unavoidable... or not? It is after all, 2019, and not 1999, and algos have come a long way. I'm very new to all of this, so please focus on my observations as opposed to my not-so-well-thought-out-solution, lol.Interface is a bit buggy and difficult to use. I'm by no means a techie, but I'm much better at using computers than the average person... and even I found it a little difficult to navigate. It isn't exactly intuitive. And on my introduceyourself post, I tried adding a picture several times, but it didn't work. I had to upload the picture to a different site and then link it via html code. Your average person won't know how to do that, and even if they did, they would most likely couldn't be bothered to go that far and just ditch the site. But again, I understand this site is very new and nothing is ever seamless in the beginning.
From my experience, close-knit communities without a strong central authority tend to be very unaccepting and resist change. This causes communities to go through a slow death. YouTube has gone through several big changes, and every time they do, nearly every vlogger whines and moans about it for weeks, yet YouTube keeps growing and content quality keeps going up. Unlike the average YouTube vlogger/user, the people in charge have the knowledge, the stats, and can analyze everything from a macro-level, which allows them to predict how new additions and policies will shape the community. When giving too much power to the people, it gives the uninformed too much power. If I understand correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong - but adding new features that change the fundamentals of the architecture requires a consent of all parties involved, which makes it difficult for the whole community to pivot in a new direction, no matter how good it may be.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I want a totalitarian system. I definitely see a lot of advantages from decentralization which is why I wanted to get into this space, but there are good ways to apply it and bad ways.
Again, I'm very new to all of this. These are just my observations and I understand that I'm not providing any kind of macro-level bird's eye view solution to this because I just don't have the experience and knowledge on here..... and I'm not even sure what I'm saying makes complete sense, so feel free to correct me where I need to be. I will not be offended.
Quality of the content sucks because a lot of people are just farming there own low quality posts using vote bots to get more Steem. The good quality content gets 0 on Steem right now. No body is even looking and curating anything on the site. lol so yeah the content is gonna suck.