As someone who has covered Twitter as a business for the past two years, it seems like there are really only two issues to focus on.

First, if Steemit wants really explosive growth, it needs to be easier for the average Joe to understand. It won't get there over night. It took a while for the mainstream (non college students) to understand Facebook. Twitter is still having this problem. Steemit has a huge hill to climb in order to help people understand crypto currency. To be honest, it's all a black box for me, but participating is fun, so I continue.

Second, the site IS set up for success. In a decentralized structure, we ALL learn from our mistakes, and adjust accordingly. When any system LOVES small, non-fatal mistakes (like kinks in how voting power is calculated, or bots taking over, etc), and learns from them, the power of the system increases exponentially.

In that light, this is what I see happening with fewer posts, as @dantheman references. People are learning from their mistakes--they are posting less crap. That's a good thing.

Overall, the ecosystem has great potential to be an example of antifragile growth.