The other thing is that perhaps the biggest draw card at this point for people is that unlike Facistbook, precisely there is no censorship. In the circles I used to find myself there, the number of times I saw reports of this kind of mischief, and then there was the damning revelation that fascist books mods in fact have a definite agenda.
So in other words, for the time being, these MSM following types, and their leftist leanings, are not really in the target demographic for Steemit at this point anyway. The idea is that people who believe in freedom and anarchists and this kind of people, we now have our own soapboxes, and as we post this kind of thing here, and not get shut down, sooner or later the entire alt-community will be here because they can find stuff they want to read. Some proportion of the users migrating here will also bring money to the platform, bidding up the value of Steem as well.
Right now people think it's outrageous that a post can get $15,000. Wait until the market cap is over a billion, right now it's close to 200mln... I also mentioned before but those figures can be deceptive. They are based on Steem prices and the reward is split and most of it is vested, into 1 week maturing tokens and 2 year slow payout tokens.
From @l0k1 (So in other words, for the time being, these MSM following types, and their leftist leanings, are not really in the target demographic for Steemit at this point anyway.) I agree with your statement, but the people I am referring to are nearly computer illiterate, all use the smartphone, and those that have laptops & desktops used to depend on me for setup and repairs. ( and now I am hundreds of miles away from them). I am starting to come to the conclusion they might be intimidated by the complexity because all are conservative, libertarian or anarchist.
This is why there needs to be ongoing development. It is one of the very neat mechanisms of the voting rewards system that you can see if you look at for example someone like @xeroc's posts. He has done a lot of work towards developing a platform to allow further development of Steem related applications. He has effectively been paid for this work. He didn't have to go through the complex and probably non-programmer-type activity of marketing it, Whales and Dolphins did it for him. Anyone with an idea and some skill with code can then take that and make something more, and most likely, posting and publishing and making it available, will also result in the developer getting paid through the voting mechanism.
I am also wanting to get involved with this. I have some ideas that will help users filter content down, to facilitate moderated groups, a non-aggressive method of eliminating unwanted content from your feed, that does not impact others helps a lot.
Once all these things are in place and people can use them, the possibility for expanding the demographics of potential users greatly increases. Which is why I should stop talking about it and start coding it :)