It is a lot of work to create a social networking site with a rich enough feature set to attract users outside of some highly motivated demographic.

Looks to me that Steem is getting mostly people who know someone affiliated with blockchains and/or are trend followers and early adopters of new ways to make money online.

To cross that chasm to be able to have viral spread of any user on facebook, requires you have a much more rich feature set than Steem has now. Most users would come to Steem and not find any thing interesting to them, nor any activity they are interested to do.

It is not easy and they have a lot of work ahead of them.

And any competitor will have huge amount of work ahead and catch up.

And there is no guarantee of gaining mass adoption. It is not clear that this model of paying most users nearly nothing and a few others large rewards adds anything to social networking that users really want and need.

I am thinking will need more enticement to cross the chasm. People basically use social networking for relationships and other things that interest and entertain them. The activity value is probably more important than any payout, unless you can really replace their day job, but can you with this model?

The model that might work is the professional bloggers earn a great income on the site, then the other users come there for them and the community. But so far, I don't see what sort of trend developing on Steem, but it is early still.