From what I've seen there have been hardly any new accounts created on Steemit in the last few days. I'm seeing people reporting problems in Steemit Chat, but there doesn't seem to be an active issue for the problem on Github. There was a problem with the @steem account running out of Steem Power to delegate, but it's got some to spare for now. Signing up has used SMS for verification, but that is not available in all countries for all phone networks. I've heard that the team may be verifying accounts manually, but is that viable?
We know that an email account is not enough to verify that it's a human opening an account. I think when I signed up you could use your Github or Reddit account to do so. Other sites have more resources to verify people, so we may as well exploit them for that.
We really don't want masses of bot accounts trying to exploit Steemit. Of course people should be able to create bots to do useful purposes here, but you should only get paid for doing what Steemit was designed for, using human attention to highlight good content.
I expect that people have been checking out Steemit due to the boost Steem got from the recent cryptocurrency boom. I don't know what sort of errors they are seeing when they try to sign up, but it's likely to put them off. We desperately need more humans here. Only about 1% of the accounts are actively commenting or posting and that's just not enough to be viable in the long term.
I still think that Steemit needs a status page like Skype or Dropbox. If users get an error they should be directed there for the latest updates and be given a place to report problems. They are turning up in chat in various channels, but I don't see any official responses.
This may sum up the new user experience at the moment.
You know I'm an evangelist for Steemit. I want to see new users have a good experience.
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