I am new to this platform, and I love the concept so far. However I have only gotten my toes wet so far, and I feel completely naive still. What I have learned so far makes me think that anyone with less mathematical, less crypto, and less technological experience will not understand steem at first and will feel discouraged and drop out. Others less experienced users that are new to steam and get acquainted enough to learn how steem works, may not feel enough trust in the blockchain, or the specific steem blockchain to invest, and may find that they are not getting enough attention to their media, and will drop how based on not having enough respond to their media. While others may understand this well enough, may believe in the concept well enough, and may want to put more into their steem account, but are stretched too thin, and may fall beside the wayside for not being active enough, or by not having enough steempower to be effective.
I have witnessed a lot of games by those who use vote-bots, and those who hate votebots and try to use their steempower to harm others here. I have researched this enough to understand why vote bots hurt the economy and the purposes behind steem. I also understand why whales would want to discourage this practice. I have also saw benevolent whales who take on the task of creating some balance for those who either are too small to be noticed and use vote bots to get a bit of a boost. Or who are too naive to understand what they are doing.
All of these along with the mathematics behind the algorithm and the steem economy, make this a daunting task to learn enough about, just to get started posting media.
For a person like me, who is an early adopter of bitcoin (2010), and someone who has been mining since 2012, and someone who has made large transactions and investments in cryptocurrencies, I will probably see this through at least a lot longer than others. I may find that this is one of the better social media systems, and stay the course indefinitely.
However I want to empathize with those who feel discouraged. I am on that boat right now myself. I feel a little discouraged that I am producing quality media that I have traveled the globe to create, and I am editing and posting with thoughtfulness and professionalism, yet I am getting too little response.
I have promoted my posts via the steem platform and it feels like I have wasted money on that. I have applied SEO tactics that I would normally use on other platforms effectively, and that has not helped my cause yet either.
Right now, I feel a bit like I am pissing in the wind.
Soon I will update again and note my progress. That is, if I am able to even upload my videos. I have had 6 uploads fail, and I have not been able to correct the problem and get those videos uploaded (on d.tube). So it appears there are some bugs in this platform still. I wrote about it on another post, displaying how my post shows up (one of them), and the video preview image shows up. But the video will not play for anyone, and given an error saying something about an "unsupported format", despite that it was uploaded in the same format as other videos that I have uploaded that do play properly.
It's hard to say what's next for me on steemit. But I will continue to post as I learn how this system works better.