Well, I'm considering what I can do-- your post raises some important questions. I was wanting to fully use and understand the site bit before promoting it outside... because I have a 20+ year niche reputation, I'm cautious about recommending anything till I have personally determined it's "solid."
Steemit has a lot of promise, but are also some unanswered questions for me about the "social blogging" side... so I'll keep digging. After that? I have a pretty good social media presence, including a FB page with 15000+ likes and a group with 9000 members... and a few other connects. IF I decide to move some of my niche writing here, I'd certainly promote the site... at least through simply sharing links to articles here, which would typically result in 500-1500 new eyeballs, per exposure...
What's holding you back at this point?
Not a whole lot... I made a mental note at the beginning that I was going to take two weeks to explore before making any concrete decisions or recommendations. That still stands.
Question marks would be things like feeling a little uncertain as to how these various "bot wars" are influencing (or going to influence) the sense of community among non-developer content creators. Also trying to see what (if anything) takes place to (a) encourage active member retention and (b) to poke once active but now dormant accounts back to life. Also, if this is to be a "social" site, I'd like to see what plans are in place to develop social features... the "2017 Roadmap" was somewhat helpful in that sense.
Yeah, I think that's one of the drawbacks for Steemit right now, but only in the sense that everything is still relatively new. Most people aren't used to the idea of voting bots - or at least having them so blatantly displayed. They're likely more prevalent here due to the money-making aspect of the platform, so I don't think they'll be going away.
But the "wars" are certainly an issue to watch. I really don't find that helpful at all and it can certainly turn off new users or potential users. Some people just can't help themselves though. Until there can be some changes in the code that can mitigate some of the effects of "malicious" bot behavior, all of this will likely continue.
Many of us have been waiting on this for a long time. There doesn't appear to be much in the works, other than creating a better means for developing "communities." There are some plans for improving the UI, but we'll have to wait and see what exactly those changes will be and how they'll look and function. But something certainly feels "broken" on Steemit when it comes to adoption and retention.
I personally feel like there isn't much of an effort to manage expectations and to make using this platform more intuitive. And some of the proposed changes for the new hard fork will only add more complexity to the system. I thought this was supposed to be a way to onboard regular social media users into cryptocurrencies, but it seems to be making it appear more complicated due to the very large learning curve, which will only continue to grow with the new proposals.
I would love to see more of a return to simplicity, a better site design and UI functionality, and some actual marketing. Everything else just seems like band-aids.
Well I hope to see you take that next step!
In the meantime keep exploring and getting to know the site. Also, thanks for the consistent comments!
Following you now, despite the fact you are a 'Cat Lover' ;)
@mynameisbrian, thanks... we also have a dog, btw!