Yes, it can. I personally think that a good step to make Steemit a great and profitable place for everyone is the following:

Hive account@steemit founders work hard on curation (or carefully hire someone to do this on their behalf) and use a part of their voting power to upvote let's say 30 of the best posts/comments every day. Good posts will immediately appear in Hot tab and get more exposure and even more profit.

Moreover, this will help to get much more quality content in Hot tab, so new potential users will be much more likely impressed by the content quality they see in Hot tab, by the profit the platform is able to offer, and those users will be inspired to open an account and start blogging. And of course this approach will inspire the current Steemit users as well :)