I am and have been a believer, since I joined steemit, that it will become one of the top social media platforms and be up there with your YouTubes, Facebooks and Instagrams and I think the main factor of getting there is time.
Steemit really is an incredible idea that has so much to offer in many different ways, however as I have mentioned at various points in the past, I think steemits growth is slowed down because people that don't understand crypto and exchanges are scared of learning how to use these things.
I have also said before I think steemit will grow as the whole crypto ecosystem grows as the more people that understand these areas, the more people that will be willing to use them. However I think it will take a while longer before steemit and crypto not just gets excepted but gets understood by the masses. I think we are looking at the time frame of around two years before steemit starts to enter the conversation along side the current large social media platforms.
The two year time frame is of course just a guess but it is based of the growth I have seen during my time on steemit, the fact that many people in the world are looking for new sites to use and new communities to be part of and then importantly the speed that the general public are picking up crypto, because a year ago if I was strolling around town I would never hear anyone talking about crypto whereas if I'm strolling around town currently I will often over hear people discussing crypto and people urging people to get involved. So from what I have seen I think two years is a fair time frame for things to start getting in the mainstream conversation.
Community:
I think the community of steemit needed at least its own paragraph because it is one of the main driving forces of steemit, without the community it would just be a blank slate. Recently I have been very proud of the community because I just see more and more people helping each other along with the various community projects out there that are not just focused on helping small users but improving the site as a whole. I think the community really is what makes steemit great and will attract a lot of new users in the future.
To me steemit seems to have a community like know other, people are usually willing to have open conversation and listen to others point of views and rather than shunning people that are wrong people try to help educate, and as I mentioned before the site just has a lot of great community projects helping people grow and produce better content along with others that have the hard task of trying to raise awareness about the accounts that buy votes are just hear purely to make a profit even it it harms other users and the site altogether.
What also makes the community special to me is that know one is forced to behave in a certain way or post content about forced subjects, some of the credit for this has to go to 
