Regarding The First Steemit Marketing Inititiative

I read this post several times yesterday. I think like a lot of others it smelled off. I had the same initial reaction I have had when approached by MLM scheme or a Jehovah's Witness. An initial and immediate reaction of "I'm not buying, go away". Again this was my initial reaction, I didn't vote, flag or comment at the time, just moved on and went about my curating duties. I did find it linked several times in other articles which is what caused me to keep going back.

The biggest thing I saw was an objection to a person involved in the project. I won't talk about him, but did want to see why it had rankled some people and want to share this.

Sorry to detract from the subject. I am juvenile and exposed to a lot of to porn.

It's a great idea, it's just not very user friendly. I think a lot of the original people and bloggers who are accustomed to this may be overlooking that aspect a bit. I pointed several members of my family to this amazing platform. Every time it has led to a few questions, and general loss of interest in short order. From knowing how to secure account, using markdown, making your photo's available, adding video (same thing I know) to being able to cash out your earned rewards. It's all a bit overwhelming for the average user. As I said in my response on the article
"Currently this website just doesn't do it. I could point this out to my sister, tell her all the great things we are doing..... and she would need to spend hours figuring out things she does without thinking on Facebook."

For sign ups and active user to grow. It needs to be easier to use, and a software packaged solution accomplishes this. Currently steemit requires either a basic knowledge of crypto and markdown... or a strong desire to learn. We can have a wading pool, new user shouldn't be asked to jump in the deep end!

I am intentionally not going into the marketing aspect used, except to quote @alexc, "this looks and feels like a spammy scammy affiliate marketing project... in same league with penis-extension pills and anti-balding creams and diet pills that don't work... that stock photo makes me cringe - it looks like you're selling something dodgy... even if the product is good....." I highlighted from his response as I don't believe many read all the comments when they get lots of responses as this did.

The answer is, I don't entirely know. I did like @alexc ended his response with a hope that it wouldn't succeed in it's current form. It is my opinion that something like this is nothing but helpful for the steemit community done properly. As a group of people all interested in the future success of steemit we don't want to see something completely shut down because of the initial first proposal. Would it be too much to have it funded entirely by the steemit community? I would love to see this concept redesigned (the box was really cheesy sorry) and presented again. Myself, I would even like to see the referral marketing aspect of it gone and just something we can "purchase" as a community with our support of your product.

Lastly, I want to share my uncle's work as I have been trying to get him to come on board. He shares his work on other social media sites, but was resistant to steemit, all because it seemed to overwhelming to do what he already does easily via FB and twitter. So, here is the work of Ray Duey.