Justine, my random response at almost 2:30am is that we really still haven't done much to define what "this" even is.
That has always been a bit of a stumbling block for me, in terms of publicizing Steem and now Hive to the greater world. Most people could care less what a "blockchain" is. And they may have heard of Bitcoin. Mostly, they just want to know if they can share recipes and videos of their cats, and "log in with Facebook."
That's really what we're up against.
I use this place — and started on (then) Steemit because it reminded me of social blogging platforms from around 2000-05, pre MySpace and pre Facebook. But that's me. I' a blogger/content creator.
We have certain inherent shortcomings, when it comes to marketing externally. PeakD finally has put page views back into the interface, so at least I can now tell whether anyone reads off external posting. Absent that, writing for an external audience (although I often DO) is pretty meaningless, because I have no clue whether anyone responds and reads.
We need referral/invite links. NOT because I have ambitions to make money from referring people, but because I want to know if anyone signs up if I send out 20 invites. I want to know, so I can welcome them, and follow their content. And that's NOT a stupid thing to have. And it's a pretty simple thing to code, because ALL links to our content has our username as part of the root URL. It's just a matter of cookies...
There's more... but my brain is cooked, and I need to go to bed!
I agree, we need a simple to use platform that is fun and enjoyable. Content will play a huge role in that for some, games and apps with take front row for others.
Good ideas about the referrals etc would be cool to somehow link it to the person who gave it out.