So which is more valuable? 75M people or 250M people?
Do you want STEEM at $100? $500? Even $1000?

You make this and a few other assumptions about users/visitors and prices. I’m wondering how you arrive at these numbers, without it being based on something completely unscientific, such as “Facebook is worth X,” or “If we had as many accounts as Reddit...”

My goal is for STEEM to be as successful as possible.

It appears that your criteria for “success” is the price of the STEEM token. So how do you think we can achieve higher prices by simply acquiring more users who can then earn and sell the blockchain’s tokens? There is no revenue and distribution model to monetize all of the added eyeballs on the interfaces, so using traditional social media valuations for the Steem blockchain doesn’t exactly work.

Mass appeal is what STEEM needs.

Is it? I mean, it could be helpful if you think more users = higher STEEM prices. But adding tens of millions of active users could lead to bloat and stress on the network which then leads to decreased performance...and user frustration.

In this article, you didn’t mention the unique aspect of Steem where resources are limited and coded into the blockchain (and about to change with HF20) and where there is a shared pool of rewards that only have any monetary value because of speculative investment. The entire “quality” argument is premised on what “we” want, but the price assumptions seem to disregard what speculators/investors may actually care about.

One last thing I’d like to add is - I think too many of us get the “quality” assumptions wrong. Contributing “quality” content isn’t about our subjective opinions on particular content that we like. Quality has more to do with whether or not the content offered is new/original or copied (or plagiarized) and whether or not the content offered is of a popular subject (having the ability to “go viral”) or highly-sought information.

Anyone can post whatever they want, so long as they have the necessary minimum resources allocated by protocol to do so. But that doesn’t mean that their contributions of content ought to be rewarded and nobody should be expecting rewards.

The biggest problem we have with user retention is a wild expectation of becoming rich, then massive disappointment when that doesn’t happen for most users (which is no different than other social media). These expectations need to be better managed and we should do a better job of explaining all of this to new users. But the thing is...our interfaces really don’t have much to offer users other than the hope of making some money, which is why user activity appears to be tied to STEEM prices.

Long story short...we need a better culture and something actually appealing to offer to social media users. Without the latter, we can’t even get to the former...and without the former, the latter isn’t very appealing. If we fail at both, then worrying about the masses and what kind of content they want to share is moot. They won’t care about the Steem blockchain - but it can be argued that a successful (a term you used in this post) platform wouldn’t even need them to.

That really should be the goal for any social platform: whether it has mass appeal without the allure of getting paid to use it.