I think the best thing I've heard on "attracting new adopters" is Jeff Berwick's comment comparing Steem to Facebook. I rephrase it this way, when I'm talking with people signing my petitions:

1) You don't need to pay anything to try it out, just like you don't need to pay anything to try out Twitter or Facebook.
2) Hey, you know how Mark Zuckerberg made billions of dollars off of people getting on his social media site? (Wait till "Yes" -they need to acknowledge this, or nothing else works.)
3) OK, well, instead of advertisers giving Mark Zuckerberg billions of dollars, and giving content-generators little or nothing, there are early-adopters on Steem giving other users a few dollars for every good post they make. 
4) There might be billions on Facebook, but there are only millions on Steem. Even so, it might be worth it, and it has been worth it to a few non-millionaires already.
5) This puts you, the user, in the position of advertiser, trying to find out what those users think is important, in exchange for an inducement to "advertise" your ideas on the site. ...Just like advertisers on Facebook need to figure out a way to get people to click on their advertisements.

Steem isn't like Bitcoin, and it cannot likely compete with it, as a digital currency alone. (The social network is the more crucial component of the two.) 

Steem is like Twitter and Facebook, and it can very likely take huge market share away from them, if it "does social media right."

Simply by adding "up and down" arrows, like Reddit, and not limiting people to "up arrow only"  (like the monolithic and stupid Facebook and Twitter) Steem can gather a lot more "pressure."

Simply by pledging to never censor or ban *any* *user*, for *anything*, (a Hard Pledge To A Culture of Free Speech, to gain users like Milo Yiannopoulos), Steem can peel away thousands of users from Twitter and Facebook. (So what do you do about all the white supremacists, etc? Simple: You allow them, but hope the culture minimizes their posts. You also allow people to "Show all flagged posts" and "Show All Posts Downvoted Below 75% of total votes").

Perhaps you even have a "Up Vote"(positive) a "Down Vote"(negative feedback) and a "I Read It Vote"(neutral). This is a way of signaling that a post/topic's responses are all important to you, but that you didn't think it was worth parting with Steem over. Some people have called this a "Thumbs Up" button, but I don't think it's as positive as a thumbs up. It would exist for a different purpose. 

One implementation of this "neutral button" is that the neutral votes pay a micropayment to everyone who uses it. This way, a "hardcore steemer" can get on Steem and make anything between minimum wage and a dollar per day. In some countries, a dollar a day is significant income. It's also many of these countries where dedicated people post crappy posts in broken English, *through no fault of their own*!)

Another great idea, in my opinion, is to "allow advertisements on my content" if people sign up for the neutral button. Then, split the ad revenue, minus costs of implementation(what it cost to "seal the deal" and insert the code) between all users who agree to look at advertisements. Those who use the neutral button more would then be able to earn more of this "advertiser revenue."

Another idea I've considered is making the searches "more egalitarian" by allowing more labels, and returning more results. (Results in a grid that smash data into the smallest cells possible, so that people can use multiple screens to see the "most-relevant-results."

Also, gitiki wrote: " We drank and chatted with people. Explained the concept, showed people the website, explained that there was no risk."

Of course, every careful thinker always runs away from the term "No risk." The risk is that you will waste a lot of your time on a bogus site. The risk is that, if you're on the site to find a bunch of local friends, that the only users will be in another country, or people who totally disagree with you. The risk is that you will feel bad about the time you spent writing posts that you believed were objectively better than "the whales' posts" because you spent 24 hours writing them, and they received less than thirty cents of steam (while another mindless "clickbait" post you made gets you $10 worth of steem).  

The biggest risk? That you will be scorned by the site, or banned from it, as Milo Yiannopoulos was. (For this reason, I think it's wise to make a bold claim of tolerating all speech, no matter how offensive. If someone wants to post "Faces of Death" or gay porn, there should be a place for that on "Steem.")

Further, I think it makes a ton of sense to add a "geo-steem" feature, that allows people to plot themselves or their-home-to-within-1-mile(actually, their precinct) on a map. This could also be a "geopolitical steem" feature, if it included every district a person lived in, ( precinct>cityCouncil>mayorCity>countySheriff>stateHouse>stateSenate>USHouse>State ). To include "local chatters," one would only need drag a circle out away from one's precinct, which one could also do without declaring one's precinct, simply by clicking on it. (I believe I know more about "political-strategy-from-a-libertarian-perspective" than anyone else on this site.)

All of the above suggested "improvements" or "new functionality" to Steem are in the domain of "Emergent order" or "The Wisdom of Crowds." So, maybe there would be people who all sign up for the "neutral button" and post "cool" under a post, and then armies of impoverished users in third-world-countries would click the neutral button like pigeons banging on a feeder bar as fast as possible. But so what? It's possible that a multitude of ecosystems of behavior are the natural result of "the best social media site." 

Could the positive and negative buttons also split ad revenue? Why not give users a choice? (ie: "Split earned ad revenue between: 
my positive votes 
my neutral votes
my negative votes 
ad click-throughs from my posts
ad click-through-and-purchases from my posts

Money is love. Love keeps us alive. It makes life better. It is voluntarily given. Right now, everyone dies solely because money cannot flow freely. (If you really think about it, this is true. After all, the IRS and FDA interfere with medical research, and medical research needs to be funded. Any amount of theft in the system redirects money toward "theft-avoidance" from promising medical research.)

Another "killer feature" for steem would be this: Allow people to allocate steem to subjects they want to hear about, with no limits on connected keywords. These could be any subjects: "Medical Innovation" "Politics" "Cancer Research" "Immunotherapy" or groups of Any/All keywords: "Cancer"+"Immunotherapy." This way, an idiot makes a post about Immunotherapy, and it gets upvoted slightly. A scientist comes on to the post, and corrects the amateurish post in the comments, and gets wildly upvoted. Now the scientist's vote on the weakly-supported initial post determines that post's rank in the "Immunotherapy"+"Cancer" section.

In addition to "negative" flags, one should also be able to "flag"("identify") a user as "expert" and then select from auto-generated "uncommon" keywords from the post. That way, if Jake Witmer is a fool and labels his post "libertarianism"+"singularity"+"machines"+"anarchy"+"liberty" but it's mostly interesting to "machine learning" users, then people who agree I'm an expert on "machinelearning" can label me an expert on that, without agreeing that I'm an expert on "anarchy."

In any case, these are some "outside the box" ideas I hope Steemit will find useful.

Steem is not (super) interesting as a digital currency. It's interesting as social media. And just like I've left Twitter(because they banned Milo) and Facebook(because they gamed their algorithms against unpaid political messages, and because they did not reward users for posting) for Steem, if Steem doesn't get social media correct, I will go to the first social media site to get social media correct (by my opinion of correct).

Ultimately, there will be a paid "ecology of computation" (as K. Eric Drexler wrote), and ultimately, the social media site that understands democratic Emergence (darwinian evolution, lamarckian evolution, advertising, psychology, Economics, networks, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc.) will prevail. This may take 20 years. Or, Steem can offer "all of the key elements" faster than anyone else can, because they've (1) read "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly and "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, etc. (2) acted more quickly than their less nimble "giant and bureaucratic" corporate competitors, and (3) are libertarian, and morally committed to free speech and freedom of association.

It's very hard to get the prior three values and capabilities into one company.  In fact, no company now in existence has ever done all three.

I hope Steem is the first, and that's why I'm here.

Of course, I'm also here to "generate enough supplemental income" to cure my illnesses, pay my bills, eat better, buy more defensive weaponry, and help set America free.

I hope to stay, because I like people like Jeff Berwick and other libertarians. ...But if it turns out that Steem won't serve my goals, and another site will, then I'll eventually wind up with that other site.

My point is that Steem could be so much better than Twitter and Facebook that to try it out would mean to become a permanent user, just by taking the largest "anger demographics" from FB(pay to promote groups + follower size limits) and twitter(follower size limits, censorship), and converting them to new users.