Hi @resuscitate,

If you are familiar with askreddit, you will know that it takes years for a community to become popular. Askreddit started of with no rewards (they only started their reward system very recently) and yet they reached millions of followers and became very popular with many professionals and experts participating in it. They too went through an extremely slow progress with no one answering any questions for a few years in the beginning.

Ask.Steem is only about 3 months old and has only 173 members currently. It has to reach a minimum of a few thousand members before it starts to see some meaningful activity. That is a reality in steem blockchain when upvotes are small in value. If the users are rewarded with upvotes worth more than $2.00 each for their postings you will see the participation increase dramatically overnight. You nailed it when you said, "Maybe this is just reflecting the general state of steem(it) as a whole."

If AskReddit could gather millions of members without a reward system in place over a few years, the potential for Ask.Steem over the years would be far greater.

Besides that there is one more point. In AskReddit members post their questions without any images. That makes it easier for them to do so.

In Ask.Steem, although there is no requirement that you much post your questions with images, the initial users have been using images for all their posts. Probably, seeing everybody posting with images, new users think it is a must. That probably has a discouraging effect.

You need to have patience in social media. None of the social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc) saw success overnight. They too went through a similar period of lackluster performance just like steem. But those initial users who stuck with them with patience from the beginning reaped huge profits later as they had built up a follower base and reputation when the platforms took off.

Be patient. Don't be anxious. You will be rewarded amply if you could wait with hope and endurance.