Well that's hindsight friend.
We can all agree that was/is a broken marketing approach NOW. I'm speaking from perspective of when steemit almost EXCLUSIVELY tried to grow on that motto alone.

It's also STILL pedalled by many here that are trying to onboard users from regular internet. Twitter initiative for example. Promises "REWARDS that the big mainstream giants don't share."

There is also hivetips and poshtoken live campaigns that are soldering on with that same method of trying to lure users here with the promise of rewards for bringing their content to Hive.

So we can play with words if we want to.
Then we can analyse the system honestly.