It took me six days to get approved so I agree with this post.
One thing to consider though is that if they start charging premiums to get approved quickly it may seem like they are just trying to get users money by onboarding the paying members quickly and letting the free users go by the way side.
This could over-all be very damaging to the platform as most users prefer not to pay for internet services until they know they have value. I think a "pay-to-play" system might actually hurt them.
There needs to be some solution to the long wait times, but I think in the end it may just be that steemit needs to bring in more staff to expedite the verification process or find a way to automate it a little bit more.
We are not interested in charging money for accounts. The waitlist exists for us to manage abuse of the free account system, as well as a way for us to manage the allocation of very significant amounts of STEEM and Steem Power required to create tens of thousands of accounts.
We were wasting huge amounts of money (to bot signups) when creation was instant. That abuse is almost entirely gone now.
WHY?! I just don't get it.
It's like saying: "We are not interested in paying customers."
If Steemit sold the stake you already have, you would get more money to hire developers. If Steemit bought steem for SP from exchanges, it would create more demand for steem and support the price.
I see only benefits.
Oh, and one thing that I forgot from the OP. I have a suspicion that many of those who would benefit the most from uncensorable publishing platform are also reluctant giving any information about themselves to some firm. For those people buying an account with Monero or Zcash would be optimal.
It doesn't only support Steemit Inc but the whole community. If steem was bought from the markets, it would create more demand for steem and that way benefit everybody who owns steem.
I think this could be mitigated quite well by explaining that a Steem account is valuable cryptoproperty. It's backed by steem tokens which have value. Every account necessarily owns some steem because it's required when the account is created.
For those who don't want to pay there should be an option to get to the waiting list for a free account.