I remember trying to mine steem when it was released and the whole process was way different than typical mining on linux. I spent hours on it but finally said screw it because I had other things to attend to. Compiling a typical miner takes a few minutes on linux depending on your cpu, but steem mining was a whole a big convoluted mess. Joining Steemit when the price was .08 turned out to be a better solution in the long run.
Trying to mine STEEM was a big waste of time. I tried it back in 2016 as well and didn't get anything. Someone had a GPU miner and cleaned house. I remember their miners were called like rabbit1, rabbit2....etc and every slot pretty much was taken up by one of the rabbits.