Very very true. How is this thing supposed to go big, with such low retention rate?
I don't have any solutions either, but then I haven't thought about it. But one thing that I have thought, is that steemit should get quality content, that users will read and upvote anyway, i.e. without caring about the money. I.e., when you sign up into a well-known newspaper website, and you leave comments, and you 'like' or 'rate' articles, you don't care one bit about getting paid. So steemit should cultivate the mentality that you're here to upvote quality content, and if you get paid that's all good, but that's not the goal. The writer will get paid - that will all work like before. But the reader will upvote because the article is actually good.
So, how do we make that happen? Quality content. I don't know, maybe curation rewards should go away completely. I guess they implemented them because they worried that otherwise everyone will just post and no one will read. But what happens now is that people merely vote on stuff that they know will rise in popularity. So, for instance, there's a new article that just came up on my feed. I check, and there's just 3 people who voted. I quickly check the user's account, and every single one of his articles has made upwards of 300 dollars. So what do I do? I upvote, without having read the piece at all. (I don't do any of this, it's just what I imagine others do, comparing the upvotes to the views, that are usually half of the upvotes.) And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: the article keeps rising because of a similar mindset, and it ends up trending, and there attracting even more attention, hence the trashy articles that mostly populate the trending pages.
Sigh!
Compare all this with Patreon. Patreon actually attracts incredibly high-quality content. It's how all youtube users get paid these days.