I maintain that one of the really big problems with onboarding new users to Steemit is that nothing they do, nothing they write, nothing they think, nothing they engage with – essentially nothing about them – will make a difference to their experience for several weeks and possibly even several months.

All that changes if they can get in with the right social group that is pointedly not located on the blockchain. The right Discord group. The right Steemit.chat group. The right social group who hangs together and frequently communicates – but which does not do so on Steemit because of its limitations.

Fall in with the right (or the wrong) group and you can be readily on your way to Reputation 55 or so in under a couple of months. Make contacts, kiss hands, shake babies – do all the good stuff, all the networking, all that stuff you probably hate if you're really a creator and you'd rather be spending time making stuff – do all that and maybe you can find some people with deep pockets you like your work and will regularly patronize you.

Otherwise, you are grinding to find your own community. You are compelled to continue making new content so that you have fresh stuff to show off while simultaneously digging anxiously through whatever else others are posting that are sort of like the things that you do. You leave comments on their posts, you look for kindred spirits. You convince them to comment on each other's posts. Pretty soon, you have a community – one which you will have to coordinate using tools which are off the system, because the one thing that Steemit simply can't allow you to have is a real community.

But that leads into an entirely different set of problems.