We haven't seen as many new people join Steem as in 2018 this year but there always people joining Steem. The basics haven't changed too much, though. But the introduction of the Tribes, Hard Fork 21, and the evolution of some of the front ends justify making a write-up geared towards informing those people who have found Steem recently.
In the beginning, your visibility on the platform is poor. Nobody knows you. You may not know anybody. To help you find like-minded people, it could be helpful to take a look at the Tribes. What are the Tribes? They are communities centered around a subject matter that each have their own token and a front end (like Steemit) that only shows posts tagged with the appropriate tribe tag. There are tribes for investing (SteemLeo), for Porn (DPorn), photography (PhotoStreem), creative pursuits (Creative Coin Crypto) and so on and so forth. Go to steem-engine.com and you can access the Tribe token market and your token wallet accessible with your Steem keys. The Tribe token transactions are recorded on the Steem blockchain but they're acted upon (and some created by) not by Steem nodes but by a server called Scotbot. This arrangement is called a side chain. All the posts are ordinary Steem posts separated by other posts only by the appropriate tag. Another way to access curated posts on Steem is to navigate to steempeak.com.
At the top, the Explore link takes you to the most highly rewarded content on Steem. The Tribes link leads you to a page where you can see all the Tribes. The Search functionality allows you to search for accounts or tags. At the bottom, the General tab shows you posts curated by a curation project called 
Finding like-minded people who are into the same things as you is important because these are the people you will create meaningful bonds with. Steem has a feature called Communities in the works but for the time being your best chances of finding content that you will like and like-minded authors is making use of the Tribes or the curation projects.
Once you've found people you want to follow, the best way forward is to read their posts and take your time to write meaningful comments that will add value to them. As the price of STEEM is relatively low at the moment as the altcoin market is only emerging from a brutal bear market, not many will upvote comments but that shouldn't be the main reason to comment on any posts anyway. Your best chances of forming relationships with others is to find people you find enjoyable to engage. That is the best way to gain followers. Having followers who follow you because they enjoy interacting with you is the best way to secure consistent support in the long term.
After the introduction of Economic Improvement Proposal in Hard Fork 21 in late August this year when the rules of the blockchain were changed, buying votes has become something of a rarity. If you see someone offer to sell you a large vote that is more valuable than what you'd have to pay for it, beware. Chances are your post will be downvoted by many powerful users to the extent it takes to ensure your rewards will be worth less than what you paid for your vote. This is done to protect the reward pool, which is a common resource by making sure that advertising, which vote buying was originally designed for will only take place with negative return on interest. Getting paid to advertise is a pretty inane concept, isn't it? As a result of the economic changes, many of the former vote selling accounts have become curators who actively look for good content on Steem and upvote it to gain curation rewards.
Under the new rules introduced at HF 21, curators (upvoters) and authors split the content rewards 50/50. This is why owning Steem Power is a great thing because it allows you to earn on curation. You get to read content you enjoy, upvote it and make money by doing so! The price of Steem is now pretty low, which could make it a worthwhile investment to buy some Steem Power to give your Steem career a head start. The upside is potentially massive. You could be looking at 100x gains or better if the altcoin market goes up violently like it did in December 2017 and January 2018. This is, however, not financial advice. Your money is yours and you will do what you see fit after doing your homework. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.
When you have gained some followers and bought or earned Steem Power to a sufficient extent to help you earn significant curation rewards, it is time to pay attention to how curation is best done to help Steem and yourself. If you find a particularly good post that does not have too many votes on it, yet, you should give it a big upvote and resteem it. When you resteem a post, it will show in the feeds of your followers marked as a post resteemed by you. If the post is really good, other people are likely to upvote and resteem it. Who knows how many eyes will be on it eventually. Your curation rewards gained from a post you have upvoted depend on your Steem Power and how much voting power you have used on it. Another crucial factor is the order of the votes. If you front run a large vote mass, your share of the total curation rewards will be greater than otherwise. That's why it makes sense to look for, upvote and resteem under-rewarded posts. The best time to upvote is at the five minute mark or a little before it because between zero and five minutes after the creation of a post, its upvoters forfeit a proportion of their curation rewards, the size of which is in linear proportion to how close to zero their voting time was. Going after popular authors who regularly get high rewards may not be an optimal strategy because if many others have optimized their the timing of the vote, you are going to have to share your curation rewards with many others.
That's how you do it. Just keep at it consistently. Whether you want to make Steem your funfair or a pub or something else altogether is up to you. Good luck!