RE: What will it take for Steem to reach "the masses"?
I don't remember where I heard that self-voting in the past had been reduced to 50% because the whales self-voted carrying most of the daily reward, from there the whales took another strategy of passing all their power to another account and vote your posts with what haejin is doing.
I am sure that the steemit team can make the changes that you suggest but they have another mentality that I honestly do not understand.
I am not saying that the steemit team is doing a bad job, but I do not see in them the interest of attracting new investors, if only Justin Sun could use social media to market the platform, I am sure that large investors would join the platform as @rme did, although I do not know how he met steemit.
Big investors like him is what this platform needs, I do disagree with the system that @upvu uses to use the borrowed steempower for them to make millionaires at the expense of others.
By delegating our steempower to @upve, we are enriching the Koreans who monopolize the entire trend zone, there I agree with you, when a foreigner enters for the first time and sees the trend zone, they will think that this page is Asian and the most it is likely that they are not interested in interacting on the platform.
You make many important points that I hope the steemit team will read.
@steemcurator01 please read this post.
Great point about a page looking like it's intended for an Asian audience. I think that experience is likely even more visceral for lots of visitors. For somebody browsing who expects English websites, pages in eastern languages in particular probably alert them to a potential scam (if they didn't already have their defenses up just for the crypto angle in this site's case).
I am one of the users who does not bother to see the trend zone, since it gives me the feeling that all those Asian accounts are from the same steemit team, because I do not think that all those accounts were created in the same year and at the same time, Asians took over the trend zone when the Tron Foundation took the right to steemit.