LOL i love how you say for 30 seconds. I had the opposite experience, we started using it work to market our products and because it had influence on search rankings at the tiem and Google also indexed G+ posts pretty quickly we saw a bump in traffic which is how I got hooked on the platform. Then i found communities for memes, anime, comic books, cars and digital marketing and I followed them and I really got some cool content out of it.

But you are right it was a lazy attempt and I know they tried to get the peeps frmo 4chan to come help out and make it better but yeah they didn't understand social and just tried to copy facebook from a safe distance

I do agree it would do well having new people with new ideas and hopefully counter arguments, there is a bit too much acceptanc of things and yeah if we have more people making noise a few things I dont agree with wouldnt be flying under the radar so much. Lol that welcome page I dont think ive used it in months and the UI is painful i prefer using busy.org or eSteem. I did try out SteemPlus also it really kicks up your steemit experience but it does make page loads a bit slower