Steemit definitely needs more marketing, more contests and competitons and perhaps a new ecosystem and platform economy to cope with the decentralized social media challenges, they can increase engagement and user activity on their 0latform by intoducing micro pay tasks or gigs just like upptrend and publish0x offer so to stay at the top they have to learn and adopt from other top platforms to stay in the game.
That's right. It should be the reason why the challenge is made by steemit admins with rewards bto be paied in steem upvotes.
The problem with steem network as i have noticed it recently is mainly with the paiement system which is so complicated to be simply introduced to anybody. I didn't succeed to understand how the reward system in steemit works even i read almost all guidelines available.