Well, I guess it's time for those of us willing to stick around to roll up our sleeves and see what can be done.
Going to require some thinking outside the square.
Where do most people hear about steemit and steem? For me it was word-of-mouth. But there have to be ways that the vested interests here reach new potential investors that aren't on steemit yet. Where does Steem.inc generate it's media and social media buzz? These are the places we need to be, telling the truth about the system, and generally making a nuisance of ourselves until someone notices.
It is nearly all word of mouth now yet I hear they are starting to market soon. This is one of the issues as for the most part, it is the user base onboarding but it seems to mostly be the low to mid range doing the most.
Before they start actively marketing we could aim to influence the conversation. What you would really want to do is try to do something that gets on the first page of a google search on steemit or steem, which is actually pretty difficult - unless you take a short-cut and take an interest in editing the relevant wikipedia article.
Once the social media-based marketing starts, it would actually get easier to get a message out as we can piggyback on the coverage that they are paying for. This requires a bit of coordination, but it's not that difficult.
It's not necessarily that we want to dissuade people from joining, it's that we want new people to ask the same questions we now are (or at least be aware of them), so that the 'powers that be' have to provide answers in order to keep attracting new users and new capital.
On that note, how do SMT's figure into all of this? Can they get new money coming into the system without addressing the concerns we've talked about here?