I love your perspective. Practical and not at all idealistic with lofty dreams. The same can be said about bitcoin now reminiscent to the internet back in the 80s. It was a weird stuff and only weird people use it, until it isnt.
I'm here not because of what ican do with steemit now but what it's going to be in 10 years. I would be 34 by then, still young as fuck.
Steemit is the best study for a decentralized blockchain product used by regular people. There are lessons here to be learned by other projects and even Bitcoin and Ethereum itself.
Issue No.1 is highly misunderstood because the alternative would have been a transaction fee for every single action done by a user. There is no central data server that operates the steem blockchain, and we gotta incentivize people to to run their computers to power the backend of the blockchain.
But of course my angle may be skewed because the regular Joe don't give a shit about how it all works as long as it does.
IMO Steemit did a mistake by allowing free sign ups to last so long, as well as the the way they handle the whole process. But thats a whole other issue which i dont wanna talk about.
I come to realize that for all the talk about privacy, the regular Joe don't give a shit too about how companies know absolutely everything about them. Youtube, Google, Facebook, Twiter, all the other platforms make money by selling data for predominately ad purpose. Steemit was designed because they assumed people think ads are a big deal. A simple Adsense widget on this site would probably make hundreds of thousand just based on the pure traffic it is getting.
Maybe the witnesses would eventually dial the account creation fee to 0. Maybe, because that would unless a whole lot of shitstorm on a scale that will kill the blockchain. But seriously do people really complain about paying for a member fee when the earning potential is more than fucking enough to cover it?
I think that by creating simple applications that appeal to wider groups of people AND require minimal explanation AND have minimal barriers to account creation, you can definitely increase user acquisition/retention.
I'm on the same boat though "minimal" is of course subjective.
Hmmm come to think of it..
Maybe a startup can offer a service to sign up accounts for people for free instantly after a KYC to be content consumers on the steem blockchain and maybe set something like 60% of their curation reward beneficiary to go the company .. so they only get a hold of their posting keys.. and if like they wanna withdraw then they'd have to go back to the company to apply and the company would charge a fee or something. Want full control of account? Pay!! Want to "upgrade" to full access? Select the Premium Plan!!! Then this company would be incentivized to make sure that only legit people get to have an account and not vote-farming bots, Like what steemit's free sign up is enabling.
The witnesses really fucked up the Dust vote threshold....