A lot of people show up with high expectations for how much love they are going to get when they post all of the content that made them the star of their own little Facebook show. When they come to Steemit and a "thumbs up" has a pricetag associated with it they discover that it is a lot harder to earn them.

One of the things that I think would help is having more people use tiny upvotes just to show appreciation. I'm talking about upvotes that cost next to zero SP, but still register as a "like."

There is a service called @dustsweeper that will turn all of those little dust votes into a little payout, so it isn't wasted SP. You just send them a little SBD and they will add a little vote on top of any dust votes that you get so that they will always be above the payout threshold.