RE: DECENTRALIZED BLOCKCHAINS NEED CENTRALIZED PROMOTION. It is ironic!
I understand it's a personal position and as such I do not necessarily share it. You could say the same about my position. I just like to be more precise with terminology. We live in a fast paced world of instant gratification and we think that if something doesn't skyrocket in a month or a year then it's a failure. Yet that's not how things work in the real world. Some technologies may take years to get traction and that's normal.
I'm also of the opinion that when you have incentives like those we have at steemit, you don't need to "sell it" aggressively. You give free coins to signups, you give the opportunity to make money by posting (who does that) so why would you also need to "sell it"? The interested party might think "what's the catch? Sounds fishy!!!"... People will tend to appreciate more what they found themselves rather than what they were told to do. It's just human psychology...
As for the upvotes I shot a few around - don't worry about it, it's not that it's worth anything (1-2 cents).
If you ever said the following at a Coke or Pepsi board meeting, you'd be fired.
(Not your words or context. Using this as an example for my context)
..and I do agree with you. People appreciate more what they find themselves.... like when there is an Easter Egg hunt, or a scavenger hunt in the park. However, letting the world know about steemit (or any other chain) takes a lot of effort.
It seems like we're growing virally. But in the grand scheme of things we're really not. We're just popular in crypto, and we have lots of friends/family and friends of friends here.
Personally I don't think we're quite ready to explode marketing wise yet. But when we do, the problem I'm talking about will be self evident. Don't believe me? Look at Bitshares. It's a fantastic product, but not enough people know about it, or know how to use it. No one wants to go broke advertising Bitshares, because we don't have a Mikey...
Plus bitshares is hard to sell due to being ...complex crypto. Bitcoin is already "complex" for most people, imagine things like bitshares, ethereum, etc.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=637645.msg7114149#msg7114149
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=637645.msg7116563#msg7116563
I believe ETH is the only exception so far, and that's not because it captures exo-crypto demographics or was "easy to grasp", but rather due to huge investments in the hundreds of millions by corporate money. So the money made it rise and then people were kind of forced to look at it.