Could it be that you have a lot of follow-you-followme followers? If thats the fact, thats your problem. Most of these followers aren’t interested in your postings but are only interested that tou follow them.
If have been around for 2 months and still learning each day. I try to be active browse the categories which interest me and place genuine comments.
If you keep on doing this you will see that interaction starts to take place and you will become more hooked and interested into Steemit.
Keep the faith!

I'm sticking around, unfortunately a lot of the web has been going more and more into video, and for me and other deaf people that may or may not be a good thing on account of our need for closed captioning. It's not uncommon for me to go to a YouTube video an download it's caption file and just read the words of a 30 minute video in a few minutes and move onto the next.

Steemit provides me with the reading material I'm after. Granted it's not as diverse yet as I'd like, but there's plenty people here enough so far that I do tend to have regular content fed to me from people I do follow that keep me going. I notice lately that I'll start messing with Steemit and before I know it, 5 or so hours have past from mostly just reading people's stuff.

Not to mention losing an hour or 3 writing my own content as well, depending on how much time I have that I can devote to writing, but if I have a good read in front of me, I'll stop writing just to read.

There does seem to be a culture that wants quick little sound bites, videos for background audio and the like, as long as they don't have to read it seems. Which is quite sad. DTube has it's place in the world, but I'm a lot more iffy on things like dmania even though it does give me a giggle every now and again.

My future plans for steemit is mostly to communicate and have fun with others here, write my own content on a place that I don't have to worry about censorship or hosting costs and to raise awareness of deafness and issues we deaf people face, as well as other misc stuff of interest to me. The money involved is just an added bonus more than anything.

I don't see Steemit as a money making platform, I see it as a blogging social media site, similar to that of Tumblr ... with far less special snowflakes telling me to check my privilege.

Thank you for the tip. I follow at the moment only 47 people. I didn't follow them in order to be followed in return.

I see that commenting more and posting less seems to be the better strategy in Steemit. Another problem I'm having is the low signal to noise ratio in the homepage, and trending and hot tabs of Steemit.

The interesting posts and people I have found were mostly as a result of Google searches instead of browsing Steemit. I can imagine that it takes quite a while until we figure out the details of Steemit and I think this is one of its downsides.

As I mentioned before, at the moment, it looks like the early days of Twitter to me, but as you dig deeper you come across valuable people and posts.

If you're interested in reading and writing in long text form, Medium could be the place for you. Honestly, if the investment and cryptocurrency aspect wasn't involved, I wouldn't spend any time on Steemit.

Nevertheless, Medium is not decentralized. So, if you are concerned about that, Medium might not be the best place for you.

Having said that, I haven't seen any censorship on Medium. On the contrary, in my experience, Steemit is the place where people can easily censor each other through flagging, which creates a toxic environment. That's one of the reasons I'm a proponent of the tipping system instead of the reward system.

I like written material as well. I listen to podcasts only when I do something else such as working out or doing the dishes. I find watching videos a waste of time, even though I indulge in that sometimes. Frankly, I don't like it that I come across Steemit posts that consist of a video only.

I'd rather watch my videos on YouTube instead of Steemit, because YouTube has a much better way of serving me what I would like. That type of machine learning doesn't exist on Steemit, which is a huge point of improvement for them.

Another point of improvement would be to filter the posts that include and/or consist of a video, and also the posts that aren't in one of the languages I speak. I come here only to read written text, the rest doesn't interest me much.

I've stated the need for better filtering, I run into video posts as well and with dtube videos, again, no caption so they're very inaccessible for me. Most people uploading to dtube or embedding a YouTube video don't accompany it with additional text and dtubers typically don't write text about what they're talking about in the video, so why bother? I consider my videos the exception when I post one without much added text on account that lately it's just me using Signed Exact English and meant for people who are signing or teaching you how to sign something. So not much else can be gained from added textual content (and even then those videos are used to embed in another article).

If I was exceptionally worried about censorship, I'd be mostly posting solely to my Flog on Freenet. Freenet Project has an exact mirror of my articles that I publish on Steemit.

Another problem I'm having is the low signal to noise ratio in the homepage, and trending and hot tabs of Steemit.

Very well-said. Indeed, this is one of the main problems in steem. You can not find good content easily. Because of that, I rarely visit the trending page. Instead, I check my feed because I choose who I follow carefully. This way, I know I will find good content that is worth my time.

Feed check is done first.
Then I do browse the categories I’m interested in.

I see, we really share similar thoughts about Steemit! There is something more about it than the money-part. I have never been so active in social media before. In fact I think I spend too much time here, but it is very hard not too. At the end, it's these few people I interact with here, that keeps me staying. I can discuss topics I could never discuss before. Many intelligent people here. I guess that's the personal value it provides to me.

To me social media is where people dump their dumb stuff. Steemit is slightly different than that. As you say, there some very intelligent people and very informative posts. They are not easy to find, but they are there. Moreover, people get into discussions like a good old forum, where they answer your questions and give you feedback. We develop ideas and we learn from each other, which is cool.

Do you have any idea if there's a Steemit Feature Requests post running somewhere where people can post their FRQ's as comments and they upvote each other's comment to see which FRQ is the most popular? That would be cool.

For me, it's more like check the replies first, then the feed, then the hot tab of the tags that I'm interested in. At the moment, the tag I'm interested in is steemit.

There's this yeti dude that's working on a new frontend with new features that he'll be pitching towards the developers https://staging.busy.org/@theuxyeti/steemit-home-page-redesign-part-iv-by-george-i-think-we-ve-got-it otherwise you'd want to hit up the steemit developers themselves.

Thank you for the link. It looks like an interesting series.

Now that I think about it, we don't need the Steemit to implement these features. Everybody can come up with their own website and/or app to access and use the Steemit data, which is on a public blockchain anyway.

Steemit.com is just one of the ways to access the underlying blockchain. If you think about it, it's just a proof of concept project.

I can easily think that another website/app combination coming up with a much better way of interfacing the Steemit blockchain and becoming the number one interface to it, taking over Steemit.com.

It is clear to me that Steemit has a distribution problem. The right content is not delivered to those interested. You need to do it manually. Compare it with Mediem and you would see the difference clearly.

I think this is a really big problem. Money should not be the only incentive in such a platform. The main incentive should be high-quality content. Unfortunately, currently, high-quality content is buried under tons of nonsense.

I agree with you 100%.

Medium is a great example of how to distribute content relevant to each user. YouTube and Facebook are great at that too.

When money becomes the only motivator, you end up with what you have here.

Another problem is the 7 days rule. I don't mind getting great content that is older than 7 days. With the 7 days rule, we end up with only the content that is generated in the last seven days getting featured.