@tarazkp made the point today that the total financial transparency that we have here makes most Steemians want to keep their walking world identities to themselves and that the pseudonymity in turn impedes the building of trust and communities on Steem. I disagree on that. Pseudonymity does not impede online community building in the least. I've been a member of many online communities where the community members have not shared their real world identities. Pseudonymity is the norm on any public online forum. Steem has complete financial transparency. Such level of transparency is radical. Pseudonymity is to be expected. But pseudonymity means that people will be reluctant to invite friends and family because doing so would be tantamount to doxxing themselves.
I don't think this is the only thing making the mouth-to-mouth organic growth of the Steem user base difficult, unless this is the real unstated reason most people that I've introduced Steem to and marketed it have been unwilling to consider joining. I've only heard the "everything is public" reason for declining to join from one person. It's a combination of things including the complexity of the platform, the novelty and the negative image of the crypto space and the fact that most people are followers by nature.
I think the good news are that pseudonymity is completely ok for most people and financial transactions do not need to be part of the Steem experience of many Steemians if they are onboarded by centralized apps that take care of the whole of interacting with the blockchain on behalf of the users. If people love centralization and handing over their data and the value generated by their online activities to third parties so much, then why not build a Steem app that allows people to sign up using their Facebook identities (sic!)/whaterver and that monetizes their content for its own benefit? The could even encrypt the content and use machine generated placeholder accounts just to tap into the reward pool while pocketing all the rewards. That's precisely what Facebook does from the users' point of view and billions of them lap it up.
Another possibility is to develop Steem not so much as a social network but a content delivery platform. Again, a centralized Steem app holding massive SP could use web traffic analytics as a basis for auto-curation of content created or combine it with curation information provided by masses of permanently demonetized app users logging into the app using Facebook or Voice (sic!) accounts thus putting to good use the KYC-like procedures already in place on various other platforms. That would actually demonstrate a lot better business sense than allowing some pesky users to have a cut especially if the users willingly agree to that. lol