Steem is open and permissionless for anyone to use, and the facebook and reddit account creation make it very easy to make an account for free. If anyone including a newspaper, magazine, journalist, blogger, politician, business owner, etc..etc..etc.. would like to use Steemit, there is not much stopping them.
The site is early in development for one, and for two it's clear the design is meant to be as simple as possible to let the content and curation/social information be presented without much getting in the way.
It's early. And again, simple design by design. And users themselves are getting rewarded for writing and building guides for newcomers.
Right, that's why Steemit is great. It's a social place but also puts money in the hands of people who contribute to it. Steemit's small community is growing incredibly fast. https://steemle.com/charts.php
Google is indexing the site's contents almost in real time. I don't know if it could be better, but so far it seems to be working pretty well.
Ethereum has a similar project being built on top of it called Akasha. It's been discussed elsewhere, but there are many disadvantages to it vs. Steem(it). Ethereum and Steem aren't really trying to accomplish the same goal anyway.
1st point is about actual steam situation. A system is open not because he says it's open and have no door. It's about relation with existing communities. This is why I tell reddit and twitter are not the way to that. Steem ideally is a great concept: you write and you are empowered by steem, then you can use it to buy your pizza or make happy other people BUT it's not enough. What community learned after months of cryptocurrency is that no grow means to be buried. Community should work on involving existing networks otherwise steem will be soon be forgotten. You say Ethereum and Steam aren't accomplishing the same goal can you argue? as I see it now, Ethereum have all the features Steemit have but not viceversa.
Ethereum transactions cost a fee. If you want to post or vote on a social network based on it, you need to pay. Would you pay to post on reddit?
When you are on website and transferring between user account not matter what currency do you use there is no fee, because you virtually manage it on the website. The fee will apply only on withdraw. As far as I can see thanks to Ethereum lots of websites similar to steemit will born and the bigs like pinterest, howto, facebook will soon use ETH.
So you need to send a bit of that currency to each website (with a fee), and trust them to not steal your money. You can do that with $$$, why would they use a cryptocoin for a centralized system like that? And why ETH out of all of them? When they're not utilizing the smart contracts BTC makes a lot more sense.
And upvotes would still cost my own money. Are you aware how well tipping apps work? Not at all.