The ratio of a coin's popularity on reddit compared to its overall userbase is directly proportional to how simple the coin is.
For example: Dogecoin is breaindead simple. It does nothing, and its about pictures of dogs. Reddit loves it.
Bitshares is way too complicated and over the heads of almost everyone, most especially random people on reddit. Thus we have no traciton there.
The future of Bitshares is not to appeal to mass adoption, I think, No typical man on the street is ever going to get their head around market pegged assets, shorting, collateral, smart contracts, etc, etc.
The target audience of Bitshares is businesses, where some smart, technical people at the top can be shown the benefits of Bitshares, and how it saves/makes them money, and then they adopt it as the backend of their platform. Then they drive users to it, users who have never heard of Bitshares and never will.
People tried marketing to average people last fall, it didnt work. The dev team correctly pivoted and identified the target audience that could actually adopt bitshares, and the way to bring them on board, and have them bring in their users (the referral program).
The past year+ was about trial and error, and the Bitshares team correctly learned form their mistakes. That can be seen in the design of 2.0. BTS 2.0 will succeed through business partnerships, not average joes. It doesnt need average joes, it merely needs to attract businesses who have their own customers to jump on board and bring their customers with them.