Thanks blocktrades for the insight.

I'm happy to hear that more user friendly features are being thought about all the time, I find that i've had to use several different sites and plugins to get the kind of experience I would normally expect from a social media site.

Steemd - to view activity
Steemwhales to view stats
Steemification to have notifications of activity
esteem for mobile app

I think many of these could be eventually integrated into the main site itself.

Also, I'm happy to hear that you recognise the difficulty which non-native English speakers have in reaching an audience that primarily reads English. Although my native language is Chinese, I think that I've had a little bit more success than my other countrymen because I insist on keeping my posts bi-lingual or even some in full English. The concern is that those who don't have the background to write a full article in both languages will feel disadvantaged and eventually leave.

I've seen @anwenbaumeister make some some contribution to the chinese community by arranging the translation of some good English articles into Chinese, but there is no such initiative on the contrary.

A common concern raised in the cn community is that there is a clear barrier of entry to signing up to steemit as a regular Chinese user. As you know, facebook is inaccessible in China, and most users do not have a reddit account let alone one with reputation. This is making the propagation of steemit usage in china quite difficult, even amongst the small proportion of English literate users (Which itself is a very large number of people). I'm sure that when you say

The platform should be easier to join.

You have already thought of the issues I've raised regarding Chinese user signup.

Thanks again for the report and I look forward to reading the next one.