Steem needs to boost its Marketing
I guess I've been here long enough to realize what are the strengths and weaknesses of Steem.
Let me start with the strengths of Steem.
Fast and Free transactions
Even an account with "zero" steempower can transact a limited amount of posts/comments, upvotes, and token transfers. Unlike Blurt where all transactions will cost you a certain amount depending on the kind of transactions. In Blurt, posting will cost more as it contains more memory.
Buzzing Community
There was a time when I can't even cope up with the "New Feed", that was the time when the price of Steem hit its ATH. Although active users have dropped significantly, I still feel that there are a lot of users who are posting and engaging with others. It's because of the engagement initiatives by the Steemit Team like Steem Diary Game, Curators of the Month, and many other contests they host.
Now, let me point out a major weakness that seems very obvious but very difficult to resolve, it's the weak Marketing. The Steem blockchain and Steemit frontend has always been marketed as a place where anyone can earn cryptocurrency just by blogging/creating content. It's actually true but it's very difficult to be successful in it.
Although, there are new authors that are successfully earning a good amount of rewards it only happens to the very few. The majority of people don't even earn more than 10 cents. The reward system doesn't really favor great content creators. In fact, the rewards go to where the high stakes users decide where it goes and they don't usually go to the good content creators.