I think first, just make it really easy for people to join. That's it. Worry about the other things later. Most people don't speak Blockchain and DPOS. The complex reward system shouldn't be the selling point. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). Reddit doesn't reward anyone anything and yet everyone uses the platform.
Why is that? They've gotta be doing something right. Why not reverse engineer their success and somehow get it to work here. It's not about how great a platform Hive is, we know it is but why aren't regular people using it?
Have you tried to sign up a friend using https://hiveonboard.com/create-account ?