Before long-term, maintstream success, Steem will need a bigger userbase

Hey guys!

Many Steemians are expressing frustration over the apparent disparity between the effort put in writing a long-form, eloquent blog post on a topic that's near and dear to them and getting sub-dollar worth upvotes. In fact, it seems like most revenue generated for the users comes from posts that are either introduceyourself posts or are meta posts about Steemit or cryptocurrency (The irony that this post is a meta post about Steemit isn't lost on me, don't worry).

If Steemit has the pretention to become the new model of social media platform, those subjects are of course unsustainable. A cryptocurrency community is awesome, but once the Steemit search engines and social networking system improves, just how much will you be able to write about it as it is now without writing unoriginal content? As for the Introduceyourselfs posts, they are like matches : you can only use them once, and once you're dried up, that's it. You could argue that more people bring in more introduceyourselfs - but if the first users cannot see any value in continuing to play the Steem game, why would they stick around?

I'm not saying Steemit is doomed. Far from there. I'm just eager to see a wider userbase with a wider scope of interests to get in the system and allow Steemit to fulfill one of it's goals : to create a community where quality content is created for the community, and with value.

When that happens, you're going to want to stick around. The experience you're getting from being in the beta stages of Steemit is gold in itself, so when it gets better, you'll be the first to reap the rewards.

Vincent