Steemit is not taking off for several reasons:
- it's being invaded by government controlled cronies that don't care about the freeing side of blockchain, but only care about the ability to manipulate all copies of a record at once by controlling 51% of the computation power.
- it isn't being used for anything of real substance that's mind blowing. It is basically Instagram with posts and an added regulation on how many likes and comments I can give.
- it isn't being promoted properly in advertising. Outside of the crypto world, I've heard "yeah, I tried it. It was my second blog, and on Steemit it was hard and I didn't get any votes and haven't signed in for months." That's the opposite of what you want if you're trying to make real change and upset the current market properly.
- it basically runs on whales and the whales only feed one kind of fish. That's not how you become a global social media community that grabs the young generations. That's how you become a cheap version of the drudge report, but only for crypto, and those that are now retired to Tahiti because they got rich on crypto. And it's competing with reddit's r/crypto for that! 😕
- the only people that seem to be getting heard are the short term pump and dumpers that will make a fortune on Steem runs and dips and that won't be around to help avoid or care about a Steemit bankruptcy.
So how to improve it?
- Start an ad campaign. Target Canada and then America. How? Raise funds. Ask investors for money. Or even take an extra small % of proceeds from posts for a set amount of time that ONLY pays for SMART advertising. Make sure that it's understood that it's only for a limited amount of time, keep to it.
- Make an "everything you need to know about Steemit and all of it's currency, SP, etc.," I know there are devs sitting there saying "if they can't figure it out, they shouldn't be here." Well said, for a dev looking to.bankrupt a company. That's why IT guys aren't business school grads most of the time. When you build a company, it's great that you can read the code that built it, but your customers definitely don't need to be able to. I can't believe that there's a multi million dollar social media platform that is VERY complex for your intro users and requires money up front to begin blogging from day one, and yet there's no instruction page? There should be no question about how it works, how many days recharges take, what the advantage is to maximizing payout one way or the other, etc., you're trying to grow a website, not play Command and Conquer against noobs and hoping you can win before they figure out how to play.
In my (newbie) opinion, content promotion seems to be fairly broken on Steemit at the moment. It is not working, in the sense that much of the most visible content seems to be garbage. This needs to be fixed first! The content that bubbles to the top should be top notch! Any advertising before that will be a waste of money.