Well, reddit also doesn't require people to invest their own crypto to drive up the price. If new users aren't buying in from exchanges, the price will continue to tank with 9% reward inflation and then .71 is nowhere near the bottom. I mean, I love being optimistic, but Dogecoin is valued 3.5 times higher than Steem right now so to say Steem is far from dead depends on one's definition of alive. Then they speak of SMTs...part of the value of SMTs is a vibrant user base here on Steem that isn't really here anymore because people keep leaving. Oh, and Dan is about to launch a competitior on EOS so theres that too....
One of the Steemit Inc. bubble brains the other day wrote something to the effect of I'm not worried about the first 1,000,000 users, I'm planning for the next 100,000,000. OK Capt. Clever...why don't you worry about trying to get to 100K happy daily users first....and that mobile app first promised in 2017.
I hope I'm wrong and the platform continues to evolve and get more valuable. Only time will really tell.
Competition is good for industry, so this is very good news. Competition drives industry to change and adapt in order to stay at the top. Right now, Steemit (though an awesome concept), has no competition so it's easy for it to stay stagnant ie. not deliver on promises made. We'll see how it reacts to that change.
~ Mako