Thanks for sharing your thoughts, @kevinwong.

You make a number of important points, but I think we need to look at the greater "story" here, which seems to be that Steemit has lost focus; lost direction — maybe even lost its sense of identity.

What IS this place? It set itself up to be a social content site, but as of late it seems more like its a gateway for developers to build something SMT based. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but you can't drive the sort of traffic needed to become a top-250 site on the promise "this is a great place to develop an app!"

As a content creator, I'm not seeing much happen here. Mostly what I am seeing is that the "human greed gene" is alive and well and running rampant. And then I am seeing a bunch of "apps for Steem/Steemit."

That might "sell" if you're a developer of blockchainiac. However, I doubt it'll "sell" to a general social media user. Who cares? We have a cumbersome interface; it's 2018 and I'm hard coding pages ("posts") in HTML to get them to look nice. We have almost no filters to sort content, so finding anything is a mess. I have 3700 followers-- I just wish I could "organize" them into tiers, or by interest, or by frequency of visit... LIKE YOU CAN on twitter, Farcebook and elsewhere. Why can't we have something really simple like a photo album?

And then there are all these really worthy apps-- but why can't we drop them into a sort of "frame" so the user home page has buttons/links to Dtube, Zappl, Dsound, Steepshot-- to not only increase EASE OF USE, but to create some "cross-pollination?"

Why do I say all this?

Because it's an awesome idea to smooth out the onboarding process, but just WHAT are we onboarding all these newcomers INTO? Let's, for grins, say that we can suddenly onboard 50,000 people a day. That's AWESOME! BUT... what are they going to find here? An attractive, intuitive, easy to use social content and blogging site?

WHOMEVER is running this show-- be it STINC, a team of developers, the witnesses, or the community-- we need to do some serious "housecleaning."

Encourage Manual Curation Whether we need to go back to 50/50 rewards or not, I'm not sure. But something needs to be done to encourage interaction and engagement... to make it more attractive than automation and bots. On self-upvoting: a simple solution-- you're welcome to self-upvote, but self upvoting drains your voting power 5x faster than voting for someone else. On Upvote bots: don't outlaw them; simply CLEARLY label any post with a purchased vote "Promoted Content" or "Sponsored content" just like other social media sites do.

I think this place is awesome, but we need to KEEP it awesome! Think of it a bit like a garden: You can't make it better by just adding more and more plants-- you have to make sure the plants you ALREADY HAVE are thriving. And they are not-- judging by how few active users we have, we have a retention problem. THAT might be a good thing to work on. And if we're (hypothetically) going to sign on 50K new users a day? Let's START by giving them a REASON to want to STAY here and become loyal "pitch people" for Steemit!