Good post, man. I've really loved stumbling across steempeak, and it's made the whole steem experience a lot better. It's a far better first introduction to steem than steemit.
Regarding explanations, steem, like all cryptocurrencies and blockchains, but to a bigger extent because it aims to attract regular social media users, suffer from the highly technical nature of their implementation. When steem gets wide adoption, people are going to be losing their keys all over the shop. They already are. I'm not sure that there is an answer to that, but it's a big hurdle for retention of new users. People also don't get blockchains. People always ask me about ads on steem, and when I tell them there aren't really any, they assume that there will have to be to fund the cryptocurrency. Then I have to explain to them monetary systems and how crypto works. At this point, they are in a stupor, lol.. :)
I see real problems for broad scale adoption. But having said that, as others start to see that steem bloggers are making real fiat money (after conversion), then they are likely to care less about what goes on under the hood, as long as they can get some of that cash themselves. But keys are going to be the real problem. At least going forward each successive cohort of adopters are going to be more tech savvy than the last lot, so hopefully will be able to manage using a key/password store of some sort.
edit: Oh, and SBD. I can't even explain that shit.. ;)
K thanks those are great ones to point out.
KEYS
(Something SteemPeak should work on educating users about... obviously we want to have a login with POSTING solution.)
ADs
Trying to see if there's a way we can explain why we don't need it I guess.
SBD (covered that one in another comment... I'm just going with yay we get another money. isn't that fun?) haha
Regarding the ads, regular people (i.e. most people) don't understand where money gets its value. They think for a cryptocurrency to have value, it must have real fiat invested into it. And while that certainly helps, it's not the primary way a currency maintains value. Trust and utility are the primary ways, IMO. But trying to explain this to people who think fiat is some sort of mystical object handed down by the gods is a challenge.. ;)
I'm vaguely remembering how I used to tell friends about the No Ads thing much more often now I kind of take it for granted. So i'm glad you reminded me that this is something a non-user would actually find interesting or even be confused by.