I used to feel we should try to attract and retain new users, but with the concept morphing into SMTs and communities I am having difficulty picturing advertisers or any other form of large investors coming in and trying to advertise on several platforms across multiple front ends. Just as you can't really advertise on ETH and reach the end users.
So, I really have no idea other than selling SMTs, why the traffic and end-users matter at this point. Let each community try to create an audience. As far as retaining end users to attract Investors, I have given up on that idea. As bad as it sounds with the business model I heard about from SteemFest I see NO reason to try to retain end-users or promote SteemIt.
I am not saying it isn't there... So, if you still see a reason let me in on it.
There is no guarantee that SMT's will take off passed the steem community. From what I hear, there are plans by big media outlets to adopt an SMT, buy what happens when these well known sites decide that all the bots, vote buying and trolling over who got paid what causes them to abandon the reward token?
There are solutions proposed that could prevent these, but they haven't even been experimented with yet. So I'm very skeptical that we're ready for SMT's. In my opinion steem is not yet a good example of a sustainable decentralised social network, which means any SMT could be just as unsustainable.
Aside from that, steem still gains value from all of these 3rd party applications. Personally I think they bring more value than any SMT will. They have the ability to hit specific internet markets, which means steem is no longer "not for everyone". But development costs blood, sweat, tears, time & money. Promotion & marketing basically has to come from investors and users, and as long as people are unsatisfied, they're on strike from promoting the network and those platforms.
Besides, everybody keeps making the assumption that investors are some multi millionaire or advertiser. Some day they might be, but that is probably 5 years down the road like most other social networks. Our investors are US. We're the ones buying steem when we're satisfied that this is sustainable and going to grow. There are far more of us than there is millionaire's with nothing better to do with their money. While we lose users, we lose potential investors. Not indirectly because they attract investors, but directly because all our investors started out as users.
Currently the reward pool is at 700k ish of new Steem generated. I can't see where people who are fighting over a few buck on this platform can sustain that.
Oh, I fear I am being to blunt. Please feel free to add this comment to my newest post if you wish. Reading your post and making my comments inspired a post about it, I am hoping for community discussion on where our focus should be at this point.
Thank you for alerting me to it. ☺️