If I were to call my mom right now and explain to her the allegation that GrumpyCat is abusing it's Steempower, how would she respond?
This is a serious question. Steem wants to be the next Facebook, but Facebook is filled with people like my mom.
My mom doesn't have the faintest idea of what a cryptocurrency is. My mom still has trouble removing spyware from her computer. There is a massive fundamental problem with SteemIt in that most of the content is written for tech-savvy people with an interest in the SteemIt platform and/or cryptocurrency.
If I'm a reader who's not interested in crypto, why would I choose to engage with SteemIt instead of another platform?
Following that logic, if I were a minnow blogger whose area of interest is not cryptocurrency, what reason would I have to engage with the SteemIt platform when most of the readers on the platform are here solely due to an interest in crypto?
Certainly there's potential for profit, but the amount of technical knowledge required to understand what's going on with the SteemIt platform is a major hurdle compared to joining on to a regular social network. Furthermore, the average content that is written on SteemIt is not applicable to the average person.
While I can't find any recent statistics, I found a post from 7 months ago that shows a troubling trend: Of 171,000 accounts created at the time, only 26,000 had been active during the past month. That means that over 85% of people who created an account have stopped using the platform. Plus some of those 26,000 accounts are likely duplicates used for bot farming, mining, etc. I don't know what the retention rates are for regular social networks, but I suspect that they're significantly higher than 15%. There's clearly a problem here.
However, having tried (and promptly quit) the game Eve Online, I feel that there's nothing that I can say to describe the problem better than user 
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Thanks for reading,
-Matt