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It does encourage investing in the platform and but the new user has a large amount of RC with a minimum amount of investment. If the new user is very active it does limit their daily participation. But because the RC regenerate daily it doesn’t shut new users out.

A friend of mine tried to register a new Steemit account. It's now already more than 1 month ago. He still doesn't have an active account. Seems like they don't want new members?

Sorry to hear that. When I joined it took over 4 weeks, so I found another way through Anon Steem. The process going through Steemit is slow. But you can do it almost instantly with Anon Steem and it costs about 0.2 litecoun I think
Then you have about 15 SP to start

I think there are a couple other alternative like steem onboarding and others. They vary in price.
They might be cheaper then Anon Steem, but I am not sure.

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