Thanks for this post and perspective... which I am also in agreement with.
We have only seen the tiniest tip of the iceberg-- right now it seems like "we are REALLY growing" with 1000+ new accounts per day... just wait till it's 50,000 new accounts per day. One of the reasons I'm a big proponent of gradual "organic" growth here is precisely that we can get totally swamped if there's a sudden massive publicity campaign. I've seen firsthand what two million new users in two months can do to an unprepared social content site... and it's not pretty.
I'm here for the long haul (I see this as a 5-year plus investment-- hopefully longer!) and plan to gradually keep powering up slowly as time goes by; so far I have taken out very little (just enough to pay a few bills, a couple of times) and don't intend to change that. I have been mostly "hand recruiting" new people to Steemit, and my pitch is not about "making money" but about "becoming stakeholders" as a result of creating content here. Hopefully it's the sort of approach that will help the platform remain stable in the long term.
Yes, you and I are of like mind on this and quite a few other things. I know Steemit Inc. intentionally has not begun their advertising push. Once they do I expect we'll see much larger numbers joining.
Well, until they 100% sure we won't have another episode of new account approvals grinding to a halt for a week (a couple of weeks ago), they have NO business thinking about advertising anything. The "general public" will NOT give time of day to a site that takes 6 days to create an account... what's more, many will go off and post "Steemit is a JOKE" reviews all over creation. Best to avoid that...
Yep. I am fairly certain they don't want huge droves of people yet. Ned pretty much indicated that was such in a weekend podcast a few weeks ago on Steemspeak. He did indicate the time where they would want them was close at hand though.