In a recent(?) talk bitcoin-guru Andreas Antonopoulos was asked about Steem. He is not very familiar with the platform, but had pretty good perspective.
I get suspicious when I hear the sales pitch that I "will make thousands and thousands of dollars very quickly and easily." I don't like that it revolves around making money fast instead of focusing on the quality of content or building a community organically.
When the pitch is about money, some people will get suspicious like Antonopoulos. Marketing points of Steemit have been too much about money making and not enough about real community building.
If we want to create real network effect, we need to get lots of users onboard. Real, active users who login to Steemit every day.
I've suggested couple of times that a good viewpoint is to think how Steemit should work if there were no money involved.
This is build on top of a blockchain, which means this is uncensorable and resilient publishing platform. Why not market Steemit with that in mind? There are lots of people out there who are pissed off for Twitter, Facebook and other platforms for manipulative algorithms etc. We should try to get them all here.
But there should be also better features for community building. It's really difficult now, because Steemit is just one big community. Building smaller subcommunities is hard and that should be addressed. Fortunately it's only a UI problem, the Steem blockchain doesn't necessarily need any upgrades (although something could be done, like ownable tags)
Another reason for lessening the focus on money is that when the price goes down, all the users will leave who came because they wanted to make shitload of money. Of course it's nice to tell everybody how much money can be made when the price is high, but there should be another marketing perspective when the price isn't as high.
It's all about creating network effect. To achieve that, we need lots of users. To get new users and retain old ones, we need to make Steemit so great to use that people would like it even without any monetary incentives.
The Steem community should listen to Antonopoulos on this matter. He knows what he is talking about.
Thanks for 