What a clickbait of a title, you may think! What is this guy on about?
Steem has a serious retention and onboarding problem. I think I have an idea as to why that is the case. Let's think for moment about how and why conventional social media sites grow. I remember when I was invited to join Facebook. The invitation came from a long-time friend of mine in the mid 2000s. I joined because many of my friends and acquaintances were already on board. It was a convenient way to maintain contact with them. Some of them became active posters and have remained so until this day. There is a lot of value in being able to talk to your friends wherever and whenever you want. Earning a few pennies along the way is dwarfed by the value of being in contact with the people in your life. But people quit Steem because they believe they are not earning enough! Why wouldn't they if money is the sole or primary reason for them being here?
Now, why can't people persuade their friends and acquaintances to join Steem? Why? Many Steemians have earned quite a bit on Steem, particularly when the price of STEEM and SBD were high between mid-2017 and mid-2018. But I suspect very few Steemians have paid earned income tax on their Steem rewards ever and that this is why most Steemians are pseudonymous or anonymous on Steem and wish to keep it that way. And even if people wanted to pay their taxes, calculating the sum owed would be a very complicated and labor intensive task. If it were possible to do easily and if most Steemians actually paid earned income tax on their Steem income, that would be yet another source of selling pressure. If Steem were ever to attract hundreds of millions of users, a crackdown on tax evading Steemians would certainly be attempted by governments around the world.
What the above means is that massive organic growth under the present model is a nothing but a pipe dream.
All of the above leads me to believe that if the user base of Steem apps is to ever reach millions, the vast majority of those people will have to use apps that have nothing to do with the reward pool such as Splinterlands. Light accounts (=wallet addresses without any voting capability) have been proposed to make onboarding simpler. I believe demonetizing the future user base as well as making onboarding app-centric is key. This is because paying any meaningful rewards to a large number of users would be completely impossible anyway and any promises to do so would be rightly taken for attempted fraud. Most internet users have no desire whatsoever to get paid for what they do online. Let's give them just that. This is precisely why Splinterlands able to stand on its own feet economically and thrive. It's used for enjoyment and not earning while it offers full ownership of the cards and an opportunity to earn capital gains from selling the cards if they appreciate. Splinterlands operates on a very healthy and proven economic model.
Earning by creating content is and should remain a possibility but it should be remembered that in any sort of healthy non-bubble economy, that will only be possible for a select few high-quality or extremely popular content creators in the long term.