When people say "I'm only here because of haejin," that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not interested in being an active participant. It could mean that they would have never would have bothered learning anything about steemit if haejin hadn't introduced them to the platform.

I think a greater risk is alienating all the new users who initially came to steemit because of haejin (or whoever's on some whale's shitlist this week). I've been here a little over 2 months and I've had quite a few poor experiences because people look down on new users so much. I was banned from the @SPL because someone thinks I'm colluding to screw them out of money, I've seen massive amounts of unwarranted censorship of new users by whales for expressing an opinion civilly, rampant bullying, botnets used to decimate the reps of new users for no good reason, and generally a huge amount of hate and drama around the choices that new users make regarding who they upvote or support.

It definitely takes a long time to get some traction here as a new user and it's a painful and intimidating process. I would love to express my opinion regarding some of the abuse I see on here, but fear of retribution keeps me from participating in that part of the community.

Until steemit starts making new users feel like valued members of the community, new users aren't going to expend the effort to be a meaningful part of the community. If these issues aren't addressed, there's going to be a huge amount of attrition from users who show up and immediately leave with a bad taste in their mouth, which will be much to the detriment of the community in the long run.