I made this original image back in April 2017. Not much progress has been made, it seems...neither with messaging nor implementation.
We want to solve this problem and, as the team that released the base protocol and maintains the most used Steem-powered interface, we have the most to gain by doing so.
You want to solve this problem, but you not only refuse to improve your actual interface - which is what most "normies" (the masses) care about - you also make investment into the platform far too risky and essentially useless. You dilute stakeholder influence over the reward pool by delegating massive amounts of your "ninja-mine" while simultaneously continuing your programmatic selling of STEEM tokens at market prices. Not to mention the fact that you delivered a plethora of poorly rationalized code changes that destroyed both the economic incentives and the social elements of this platform.
You're not going to onboard users while making your main selling point "Get paid to blog!" when the "payments" are most frequently on the decline.
Social media is primarily about the social experience of users. They don't need money to interact. The money is the big bonus. It's what gives you an advantage over other sites if the rest of the playing field was somewhat equal.
It is not.
Steemit.com (and the other Steem interfaces) offers very little to the masses. Communities won't matter much if the rest of the site is difficult and/or unpleasant to use and look at. Tokenization (SMTs!!!) won't matter much if nobody likes the site and the "popular" content.
So, how are you going to onboard masses with the main enticement being communities and scary crypto tokens? Facebook has groups. They work pretty well for most FB users. Same with Reddit. Same with most other popular sites. People use those and are happy...and they make no money at all.
How do you plan to compete with those interfaces when you have an aesthetically and socially inferior product? How can you entice people to come for the money when you're doing your best to make the token worthless and investment pointless?
How can you expect people to believe you about delivering on your promises when you have continually broken promises and missed delivery dates for three years? Communities have been talked about since the winter of 2016/2017 with a delivery date in 2017. SMTs have been talked about since at least September 2017 with a delivery date "sometime in 2018." We're now over half-way through 2019 and we still have neither.
You ask for feedback and suggestions...but you mostly ignore actual feedback and suggestions unless it's something you already planned on doing or unless it's blowing smoke up your asses about how wonderful you are.
Maybe start by actually addressing criticism so that the criticism doesn't go unanswered or even uncorrected for years on end. Unless, of course, the criticism is spot-on and you have no adequate response to it.
RE: Our Plan for Onboarding the Masses