RE: Should Steemit Be the Front Page of the Internet?
I would say NO. Not until it makes things that should be very simple, like uploading photos and chatting much, much easier. I took weeks to get my wife interested in being on Steemit and cryptocurrency, but after a couple days on steemit she's about ready to give up. She is usually very far ahead of me in her ability to use social media sights, but she is very frustrated by steemit already. If she is having trouble with it how will many people who aren't that social media savvy handle it? Whether you like it or not, at the moment facebook is the standard and steemit isn't even close yet and I like steemit and I'm saying this. If the people running steemit are intelligent enough to make coins and use crypto they should be able to improve the sight much faster.
I totally agree on that without the intention to offend the steem devs. The focus seems to be on steem not on steemit at the moment which is good in one way, because every building needs a good basement, but it scares off people on the other hand as steemit is not that usable for newcomers... If you check the numbers of accounts and the active accounts per day you'll see that a lot of those new accounts are inactive after a short time. So the question if their current focus is good or not seems valid to me :)
As inertia said: We might have a long way to go ..
When I suggested investing in crypto's to my wife, it led to a week of intense fighting and I mean, really close to ( some bad shit). It took me a month to get her interested in this space and now she's ready to quit and what can I say to her to convince her if it remains this challenging?
People, including developers, should not be offended by the truth.
I wouldn't say that Steemit is trying to be or necessarily even compete with Facebook; but you are right that the greatest area to add value in the near future, if not already, within the crypto space is to improve user experience. There's a lot that goes into that, though: it took the general public years and years to figure out what the Internet was and to embrace it for its possibilities beyond email and instant messaging. People had to overcome their lack of knowledge and get used to new ideas. The same thing applies here: We're all bringing our expectations from more established tech into this new sphere and it's going to be a bumpy ride until we all figure it out.