Steem most likely never will. It will remain a niche. But, even having 1% of FB's traffic would be tremendous for the platform.

It doesn't have to be niche though, it simply is because it is pulling too much of a capitalist/ROI focus into a social network. I'm not saying anything is wrong with capitalism or investing, but it doesn't blend well with the free speech social world of content platforms.

I think the biggest mistake for the Steem project was being investor-centric, and I think it was investor-centric precisely because the creators were thinking short-term pump profits.

What makes Steem valuable, and to whom is it valuable? Many of the investors don't actually want to curate content, they just want to profit by the network going up in value, so they have to pass the work onto others and take a cut in their ROI for that.

If you looked at Steem as a product what you might find is that its true primary customer should be content producers, specifically bloggers. The power of Steem is that it provides these content producers with immutable storage of their content and record history of their intellectual property. Bloggers and journalists are the people that could find value in the platform, but they are not the primary focus for adoption.

The product should be "For the low price of just 50 STEEM, you can have permanent control and ownership of your content online!" In essence, 3Speak is doing it the right way, while Steem is doing it all wrong.

If you pay attention to the various social networks out there connected to a blockchain, it becomes apparent that Minds.com has the secret sauce that attracts accomplished content producers. They don't care about being an orca or whale and being able to slap down a fat vote. Their concerns are free speech rights and protection from demonetization of their content. Steem should be serving this need before someone else does.