SteemIt is brutal on new comers. The problem newbies face is that the value of their upvote is worth less than a tenth of a penny.
Because the upvote is so low, many Steemians don't want to waste time interfacing with the new accounts.
To add insult to injury, the system deletes post rewards when the reward is less than a threshold. I think the threshold is around $0.02.
A dozen new users could upvote a post but the rewards will be washed away as dust.
I've come to the conclusion that new users, whose personal finances are in the black, are wise to bite the bullet and buy enough STEEM POWER so that the value of their upvote is worth a penny. STEEM is a cybercurrency. These things might crash; so I would not buy STEEM on credit.
I use the SteemItNow Upvote Calculator . As I write this post it says that the price of STEEM is $0.89. The Reward Pool is 776,431. It says one needs 184 STEEM POWER for the vote to be worth a penny. That costs $164 in US Dollars plus transaction costs.
To turn STEEM into STEEM POWER, one power ups. Powering up puts a temporary lock on the money. I understand it takes 13 weeks to power down. The money doesn't disappear. It is simply locked for a period of time. The SteemIt program calles STEEM POWER vests. One SP is worth 2000 Vests. 184 STEEM POWER would be represented as 368000 Vests. Accounts that have between 100,000 and 999,999 Vests are called "Redfish."
I believe that SteemIt would benefit by a huge increase in RedFish accounts. The user 
The graph shows that there's almost a million accounts in the plankton (under 99,999 vests). The plankton has 89% of the accounts but only 2% of the influence. Being plankton is no fun.
Plankton, Redfish and Minnows currently add up to under 10% of the influence. People who buy their way out of the plankton and into the redfish category would improve the quality of SteemIt.
In my graph, the left side of the boxes show data from 2018-06-22. the right side shows data from 2018-08-25. One whale dropped out in this time period. So we saw the total influence of whales drop, while the influence of Orcas increased.
If a sizable portion of the plankton took advantage of weak crypto prices and bought their way into the Redfish category, we could see an improvement in the curation on SteemIt.
So, Lets grow teeth and Eat the Whales.
I don't have money. I would not borrow to buy STEEM. I have other web sites. Rather than buying STEEM, I am trying to do my part by selling ad space on my personal accounts for STEEM/10-000-ads-for-one-steem