Wow! I find this stuff fascinating. User acquisition and growth is my bread and butter. I think there's two buckets of issues and various methods to solve those issues we can discuss.
Top of the funnel acquisition (account creation)
Search Engine Marketing/Social Ads- Unlike most websites a steemit account actually costs a non-negligible amount to create so I don't this is a sustainable route to go down.
Blogger outreach - I think there's a lot of potential here. There are hundreds of great bloggers out there that are struggling to monetize their content through ads and affiliates who haven't even heard of steemit. These (b/v)loggers have the additional benefit of large audiences that they can tell to also sign up on steemit.
SEO - We need more tutorials, guides or product related articles. These are the type of articles new users are likely to stumble on through a Google search. Articles about photography or steemit are entertaining to read but I'll never accidentally discover Steemit through those types of articles.
They big question I have is, what is my incentive for user growth? Don't I actually have a distinctive? The more people on steemit, means less of a share of the reward for me right?
User Engagement (upvotes and article creation)
In my opinion the biggest issue here is how confused new Steemit users are. It's a difficult system to understand, with no easy to digest onboarding video or tutorial. The distinction between all the currencies made me a little frightened to post for my first time (what if i lost money? what if a whale down voted me?). When I didn't receive any reward for my first few comments it felt like something was broken.
Anyway, sorry for the long winded response. I really loved your analysis!
thank you @like.basil , i like your comment and you are correct with your statement. There might be cases that there is a disadvantage on the growth of steemit community on the other side , but on the other hand , we can see potential growth also if people are help each other within the community. I agree with your statement that it is a hard start up for beginners , but as soon as you stay longer , you will learn from time to time. Again thank you for your opinion. This is a great. =)