I believe people should start to avoid promoting STEEM as a decentralized place and target the "average" Facebook, Instagram and Twitter users out there instead. The average users doesn't care about decentralization. It's not sustainable to focus on the "underground" anarchists-types of people if we ever want to see something similar to massadoption. I mean, you can obviously mention the decentralization part, but you shouldn't use that as the most important part, which people seems to do whenever they promote STEEM. - This alone would bring in more people in the long haul.

Another important thing is to stop all the "tech-talk" as this is basically nonsense for those same "average" users I just mentioned. None of them understands blockchains or how blocks are being produced... And the majority of them doesn't care, so there's literally no need to talk about that.

Another important part is to not promote STEEM as a personal cash-cow. It's not easy to make money on STEEM and people should avoid stating that, because it hurts our user retention in general. People join STEEM with hope and dreams of luxury only to find a few cents or a few dollars for weeks or even months. That is definitely not sustainable either. The distribution, and how much people can earn is not as important as the truth. If we give users the truth, they will realize that they earn more on STEEM than on Facebook, Instagram and all those other social medias, even if they earn 1 dollar per month.

With this said, I truly believe that people would invest more in STEEM if we saw these changes I mentioned. People would become more motivated to invest both time and money, and we would ultimately see STEEM flourish.

Long story short:
Know your audience and target the right people.