I'm poor. I'm staying. I choose not to be poor forever.
But, yes, the retention rates aren't great. That's a serious subject to address and it would be very beneficial to Steem if some tweaks or new features would help keeping new people here. But, as long as mass adoption hasn't occured, we share the daily reward pool with only 30k people, that's more for each of us. When there's 1M users, your individual percentage of the daily reward will be a lot less (but Steem would probably be worth a lot more).
My conclusion: every Steem you earn NOW, while the platform is still in BETA and there are not many people here is worth at least 50 times its price soon. So I'm here. I'm staying. And I'm holding.
I'm poor too, I just have a little SP because I purchased it. I do see Steem as a token that should appreciate in value and like you stated, we are still on the early side when you look 5+ years out.
I do not think most people see it as we do through. There was a stat for new users which stated something to the effect of 10% of the new users are posting after 90 days. That is 9 of 10 quitting the platform after 3 months...
I think many do not want to put the time in to build up their blog and they see the large monetary rewards going to the whales/dolphins 'clicks'... This group have their posts on the trending and hot feeds most of the time. Rep >60 or over......
Couple of reasons:
Let's not forget that:
Discoverability and surfacing are terrible on Steemit.
Communities don't really exist.
The tag system is poorly implemented and has no way to actually create remembered slices through the content nor a way to create compound slices through the content.
Effectively, there aren't any tools to manage the experience of a social media networking site that have been developed over the last 10 years which made social media networking sites big. The basics are still missing.
It is also true that quite a lot of the system seems to be deliberately obfuscated and made more complicated than it has to be which makes everything else that much worse for a new user.
Better ways to explore the content would help everyone, but not least newcomers to the platform who are trying to get traction and looking for a niche that they both enjoy and which works for them. Everything that stands in the way of people on the platform being able to find content that they like keeps the platform from growing.
I agree with you 100% on this. This has been brought up many times, yet nothing has been done.