Having tried numerous ways to bring 'consumers' to Hive/Steem from web 2 platforms, it is clear to me that a combination of factors make that way harder than it needs to be. One of them is the unnecessarily complicated onboarding systems that have been used through most of the timeline. Another is that people can easily view content on Hive without creating an account and if they want to comment then they can do that on the web 2 platforms that they already frequent with their peers.

This is why onboarding content creators is key, however, yes - they need to be invested themselves into growing Hive so as to drive new users here, rather than just using it as a secondary content repository. Again, this is why treating the bigger accounts with some respect is key and why nuking their accounts because their supporters didn't come along for the ride is not a good look.

One solution to this problem that has been popular along the way is to completely shift from onboarding content creators towards trying to get people to create businesses on the chain. However what seems more practical to me is to empower content creators to expand their 'brand' and presence in web 3 by supporting their growth instead of stunting it. An obvious way to do this is to create a crypto version of patreon/subscribestar, but to date I haven't seen that done yet