Steem has some real edges that appeal to some of my friends: particularly long-form posting, and feeds on most of the front ends that show you all the posts of your friends in chronological order. Most of us are old and remember when the whole internet was like that, and we liked it.

Those aren't even financial rewards, and yet I'm not really making a lot of effort to bring them over at this point. Everything here is so hard to understand that I feel like I need to give them a financial incentive to stick around and learn it. When I could give them a floor of $1/post I started to talk to some people, but now that it's more like forty cents I don't feel like that's enough.

Maybe that's a metric for how easy to use any of this is. In an ideal world interacting on Steem would be so easy and enjoyable I wouldn't feel the need to pay people to show up at all. We're not close to that but at least we can think about moving in that direction.