@thegreatwent thanks for placing this very interesting question. I read most of the feedback from people and my opinion is that the steem blockchain has a lot more potential than facebook and totally different visions in mind.

The steem blockchain has the vision of its creator @dan (very well explained by @teamsteem in his welcome to steemit post) that in summary it is achieving freedom for us, empowering people, returning the power to the hands of us the people, and give the control back to us. No intermediaries in the middle. And this is actually really happening. Lots of people around the world are able to make a living with steemit nowadays, something it was not possible were they live. Lots of people that are unbanked that is a great percentage of population in the world, have actual access to steem and are able to make a living with a few little of steem today. And this is just the top part of the iceberg.

Steemit and the steem blockchain has great developments already operating, this developments like @utopian-io are disrupting the way insdustries work. For instance, @utopian-io is a disruption in the way open source projects are funded. It has a created a completely new markert/ new economy, were contributors are payed for their contributions (developments, ideas, suggestions, bugs on coding, tutorials, and many other things).

There are many other developments in process. And there is a huge thing that will be released soon I believe, which is SMTs (Smart Media Tokens), were any person on the steem blockchain will be able to make an ICO and create its own crypto (similar to what the ethereum ecosystem does, were new ICOs are generated, but in the steem blockchain, and with the super power and speed and deliverabilities of the steem blockchain which is the far with more transactions nowadays and still not using 1% of its capacity. While ethereum, bitcoin and others use all its capacity with less transfer going on on their networks.)

There are so many things happening on steem that I believe it can reach $30 in the next few months, and who knows if $100 by the end of the year. And it has a super potential to go much further.

On the steem blockchain, a platform like steemit can be created, more to the similarity of facebook, but with the power of the steem blockchain, and the power for people to earn, and with that single detail, people for sure will start trying it and moving to this platform.

In addition to all these things, steem has the power of being a bank itself, and not only giving what banks does, but much more, such as speed of light 3 second transactions, no fees, it gives interest to hold steem power, and so many things that it has the power to do, and is doing.

I don't know if you heard from me before, or if you got by chance to one of my latest posts/chapters.

In addition to posting several ideas to help improve the steemit front-end in order to increase the percentage of retains of users, and to help capture the attention of more users, I also finished creating the 11 chapters/posts full steemit guide to help new members and new visitors on steemit, to understand as much as possible of the steem blockchain and steemit, and thus help them make their way on the platform.

Here is the link to the newest Chapter/post 4:
https://steemit.com/steem/@gold84/chapter-4-of-11-understanding-how-to-keep-our-steemit-and-steem-cryptocurrency-account-safe-how-to-use-the-5-different-passwords

Looking forward to hear from you with your additions, knowledge and experience in any of the Chapters!

Regards, @gold84