This is in reply to your latest comment, due to nesting limit.
Look nobody is disagreeing that marketing is important. We get it, everyone gets it. However, what good is marketing if you bring in millions of people if they all leave? Now you have millions of people with negative impressions of the site telling all their friends how terrible it is. Please tell me how that helps the site long term?
You build a viable product and then you market it. We are still on step one right now. Will that be steemit's downfall? Maybe... but that is the better option then bringing in the masses right now. They won't stay... the current numbers prove this. For every new user we bring in, we lose an older one. The numbers aren't constant right now because everyone is staying, they are constant because we are losing roughly the same number we are bringing in. If we were keeping more of the users we are bringing in right now I would agree with you, but we aren't, so I don't.
I don't believe that would have happened, this in my humble opinion is a quite credible timeline of events.
July - 1st Steemit payout - app launched
August - Market cap hits $100 million dollars - Last 30 days has been a flurry of in-app advertising and Facebook advertising (boosting quality posts to target audiences) Upshot of this is a demographic map of new Steemit users.
August - MNBC, and The Guardian newspaper write articles about Steemit - More targeted Facebook advertising and Google adwords. Upshot is a groundswell of users, possibly leading to the first million.
September - Negative feedback about the UI is overshadowed by the new "Steemit millionaires" making big in the blogging world.
OK, I won't go on and obviously I've oversimplified, and ignored the hack. However what I'm trying to get across is, if Steemit HQ were properly prepared. They would have prepared for a huge influx of users and got together a tight marketing plan.
The strategy should always be, if we make X, we will spend X - Y on marketing. Because it is advertising that generates custom.
So what do we have now instead? We still have a dwindling audience and disgruntled users; we just don't have enough to absorb the bad times.
At least with more users, there are more annoyed ones; however that means there are more happy cheerleaders spreading the good word of Steemit.
Cg