That said, the long term success of Steemit does involve more and more people building their own following. If that barrier of entry gets too high, we won't see the success we want.

The follower model is inherently pyramid-like. It's not sustainable, and why Twitter hit a plateau so much earlier than its competitors. For the same reason, Twitter is trying to de-emphasize it, by throwing in other stuff into people's feeds (but users don't like it because it's obviously not why they joined Twitter).

I think we will end up more like Youtube, where following (subscribers) and subject, trending video feeds etc. are blended fairly well.