Yup almost all the major issues keeping Steem away from small/medium scale adoption are front end level / UX issues, although actually there are blockchain level reasons why mass adoption literally can't happen at the moment. There are real constraints on number of users who could have enough steem power to post/comment/vote and those numbers are WAY smaller than "mass adoption". The only real chance for actual mass adoption in the millions of users, is if the majority of the interactions that the masses have are off blockchain.
Are you familiar with @theuxyeti ? Experienced UX professional who for a while was working on a front end focused on UX experience, although I believe that project has been shuttered to the best of my knowledge.
One interesting thing RE user retention here is I don't actually think user retention is as bad as people think, or at least, the user retention issues are not necessarily specific to Steem. As you rightly point out, the primary use case remains blogging. I don't know hard numbers but I am absolutely positive that the vast majority of all blogs are abandoned, regardless of if they are blockchain based, or wordpress, or blogspot, etc. That is the nature of blogging, not necessarily anything wrong with Steem itself IMO. It is the rare person who will actually stick with a blog and keep writing regular content for it, and it is the totally normal person who will create a blog, write a few posts (or even a lot of posts) and then lose steam ;)
I actually wouldn't be surprised if Steem blogs have higher user retention than WordPress blogs. It is certainly much easier to monetize crappy content on Steem, and you can monetize your Steem blog even if you don't have any viewers! Try that trick on WordPress :)
I don't know the macroscopic picture on user retention and my perspective on that is largely anecdotal. I've onboarded plenty of users myself and I know why they eventually left, and their complaints were legitimate.
I don't know much about the technical limitations stopping mass adoption either, but I would love for that to be the problem we're facing instead of what we're dealing with now.
Not familiar with @theuxyeti, I'll check some of their stuff out, if they're still around.
Yes you definitely have to be willing to put up with a lot of crap to stick around on Steem, not arguing that point LOL But I just think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations for user retention given that this is still primarily a blogging platform. Blogs never have high user retention, and as long as that is the primary use case, no amount of UX improvement will change the fact that most blogs are eventually abandoned.
I agree, blogging is dead. although occasionally I still stumbled upon Medium (or Smashing Magazine for free wallpaper :D).
Is there any demographic data of the steem users? I always feel that steem is for old folks. Lol. (By old, I mean, > 30s) Even the best front end like steempeak still gave me those feeling...
IMO marketing without targeting the right demography is almost impossible. It will also defining how the UI/UX based on that demography preferences...
Moi aussi. Just turn 35 this month. I'm feeling old. Lol.
Old people unite! Lol
Brilliant comment @carlgnash. Seriously one of the best feedbacks I've read so far.
Thx for taking the time to share your view.
Yours, Piotr
If you want to use this platform as a blog, some of the top 3 witnesses come down on you with placing smearing bot comments and downvote every post you make on your personal blog profile.
So the top-witnesses deliberately and systematically chase away the people who want to use this platform as a blog.
I think a more forum-like format might solve a lot of problems. People would no longer post randomly with random tags and navigating toward content a user is interested in would be a piece of cake.