RE: Open Letter to Ned and Dan: You Badly Need a Communications/Community/Content Expert and I Hereby Nominate @stellabelle or @donkeypong For That Job

Retention is pretty low right now so spending money on recruiting users may be not optimal

By recruiting new users I include retention. A huge factor in retention is who you recruit and how you recruit them. Even if we acknowledge that some aspects of retention are impaired by platform issues that need to be addressed (and done so in a manner that does not piss off the users who are already here), there are clearly users who have retained well. Understanding better who those users are and why they are not leaving would allow focusing on trying to recruit more such users. This would make recruitment more effective. You could start by figuring out better way so to reduce sign up fraud. It is still a huge issue, a large percentage of the signups, and it costs money with little likely effectiveness.

The other thing that is leading to poor retention is a small and shrinking user base. As users slowly leave (which is inevitable in any site, no matter how good, if only due to life changes and such) and are not being sufficiently replaced by new users, it becomes a smaller and smaller community. You now see the same progressively-smaller group of people posting and commenting. A small community has less value so new users sign up, see there are only six (exaggeration, or perhaps, extrapolation) people here and they all know each other, and leave. It is absolutely essential to spend money on bringing new users ASAP (including focusing on users who will retain) otherwise the users who are here will continue to slowly leave, not be replaced, and you will be left with a shell of a platform and no users.

Btw what criteria do use saying community does certain things better?

The criteria I'm using are two:

Decentralization of effort. Community initiatives are many and have a relatively high churn rate. That which works is continued, expanded, and imitated. That which doesn't is quickly revised or abandoned. The team can not do this because it is only one team, is relatively isolated from the user base, and deploying solutions in code can't be done easily on any kind of pilot basis that doesn't affect the whole site, nor is it feasible to try different approaches in parallel, the way community initiatives occur.
This post. Community initiatives do not create the kind of user frustration, hostility and push back from the user base that is evidenced by this post (in part due to their more fluid nature as described in #1 above).

If the community can do it, than let the community do it and save your limited budget of acceptable and accepted top-down changes for when it is really needed. Pick your battles. Yes, there are things only the team can do, and that includes platform consensus changes, but the approach to doing them needs to change, and change radically and quickly if you don't want to alienate 100% of the users (and I can tell you my perception of his disposition is that when @steemship starts calling you out, you passed the point of widespread user frustration quite a ways back). That means platform changes defined and developed in a more inclusive manner, with meaningful community input and feedback (such as an advisory board drawn from the user community), and sufficient time for the community to understand what is being proposed, how it affects them, and to give meaningful feedback (i.e. much slower). As such the ability of the team to effectively (without causing more harm than good) address needs on the platform in a timely manner without stirring up unintended but still inevitable frustration and hostility is already limited and becoming much more so.