Hive-steem have the same problem for user adoption, the learning curve is absurdly high, it is unintuitive and friendly for new users. Another factor to take into account is which was the argument with which the advertising channels seek to attract users, here I will put one of many examples:
a) whale or orca say that they will support initiative to attract users, it does so to maintain a status that is really involved, maybe it does so for love of the platform or really found a way to vote for itself with the smart excuse.
b) these initiatives are opportunities for communities "political parties" that have come together because they understood that operating as an ongs is lucrative, and that is because they rarely follow up on the funds they get with the excuse of managing community, users they attract by publishing with the support of the orca or dolphin. Such an initiative video always sends the same message "publish share and win and participate in our circlejerks", as a new user, you see those influencers making 20$ to 80$ in some posts.
c) This new adoption will spend months understanding what is blockchain, how to layout post, how to make a nice content, how it works hive-steem keychain, peak, follow a trail, participating in activities where they are manipulated as a sect, are used to appear masses, commenting and tweeting.
While that happens, the adoption campaign or initiative ends, why do they never show how many users the influencers and their campaigns attracted, and after 5 months how many they still publish? They will never do such honest exercises, the plan is to take everything they can and find another initiative to cheat and make money.
Another aspect to consider is how many initiatives are there to support quality content? how many whales and dolphins are there to create and support curation projects. https://hive-db.com/labs/author?grouping=monthly
if you look months after months the 100 authors are always the same, because they occupy roles or they already know people from previous activities, at least they know each other from steem-fest, anyone compares who have been there, and what names are always the authors who make more income and look what roles they have, any new user looks at the feed and tries to understand why a couple of pictures make 30$ to 70$?
https://hive.blog/rewards
Why are so few hives that give rewards, like @bluemist @appreciator and @rocky1, practically sustains the whole community, where is the rest?there cannot be an adoption because curie, ocd, curangel, project hope, among others work, there must be more initiatives, what happened to the dao?
When users understand that searching, reporting and adding to blacklists is everyone's job... is what I call having duties on the platform and not believing that because they post they have the right to receive votes (current public culture and wins) until they understand that, "good" authors will earn little or nothing.
When on the platform you can see information such as those who have been added to blacklists, ie white lists and are constantly reviewing that status, when the reputation is something else like what was raised in an algorithm steem-ua interaction, your followers and so on, when you can see the views of other posts, when users with more influence support dapps instead of promoting other dapps from other networks, maybe things could be better.