Hi all,
I don't know if I was the only one who noticed this, but Steemit for all its virtue, takes the longest time to approve new users of any existing social media site. For example, I did a speed test on both established Social Media sites and other emerging ones, the longest non-steemit social media site to sign up for was Minds.com and that was because the confirmation email took ages to arrive. All things considered, it did not take 4 days for my account to be approved, on any other site. If the goal is to grow the community, having a sign up take upwards of a week could be a HUGE turnoff. Some people may be intrigued by the idea, but if they have to wait for a week, they might just give up.
So while I do not know the inner workings of Steemit, from what I can tell the applications are looked over manually, and this is after the applicant must submit an email and phone number confirmation. I can wager the reason is because we want to keep sock accounts to a minimum, but let us be honest, if someone wanted a bunch of alts, it would not stop them to have them wait a week. If we ever want to compete with the likes of Facebook or Instagram, we are going to have to beable to process all the new users at some point.
To be clear I would like to present two options for solutions:
Get rid of the manual confirmation, if the person has done both a phone and email confirmation, that really should be enough.
Outsource the backlog of applicants to the community, for example, I have built a database of scam emails and the like for my own projects, I can easily check to see if that email is on a scam list or has been accessed during a dump by say, the 2012 dropbox hack. We are a strong community, and it is obvious we want to grow. It could be a good thing to have us all working together to grow our community, that is full of (hopefully) real people.
If you disagree let me know, If you agree try to spread this around so we can impact some change!