Brian,

You hit home some really good hard points in there.

One of the real difficulties of on-boarding the facebook friends, and perhaps friends from other networks (wechat and weibo in my case) is that the barrier to entry remains some-what high.

High in that it takes a considerably more amount of time to produce content on here, than it does on other platforms like instagram or even facebook (would you even call the posts on facebook content creation?)

There is a degree of cognitive dissonance due to the misconceptions of what Steemit actually is all about. This I imagine, is due to the platform still discovering it's own identity as a social hub, or a content creation / content consumption platform.

There are few people who would be considered successful on Steemit who behave the same way they do on facebook, or use Steemit the same way they use facebook. Yes, there are people who write lovely blogs, in their notes on facebook, and frequently write long in-depth status updates, as well as share pictures and video, but notice, these are for the sake of interacting with their friends, and not strangers. People do not use facebook to 'make' new friends. They use it to connect and engage with their existing ones.

A sub-group of users on facebook users use it in a similar way to Steemit, and those are the people with public facing accounts which are separate to their personal ones. Content posted there is largely intended to find their way to people they do not yet know or perhaps don't even care to know. They just want the internet to discover it and have their content be seen.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who I introduced to Steemit (but has largely lost motivation to keep posting) about what their goals are. As you said, yours is to try build a certain amount of following which could lead to an increased amount of rewards and thus Steem Power. Meanwhile, my friend dreams about wanting the prestige, the ability to socially influence, and to be known by millions of people (yes, the money would then become a self fulfilling prophecy in that case). However, In her case, she doesn't dream of making good money on Youtube nearly as much as being a person watched by millions of people on youtube. But here's the catch, it's not because she's covered her financial bases and doesn't require money - quite the opposite.

Steemit is not (yet) a mainstream platform, so a content creator who wishes to be 'known' and potentially recognised by people just by walking in the street will not get here. Ironically, they are even less likely to get that on Youtube unless they have particularly outstanding work.

This brings me back to your point about the effort required, and people's expectations of what they think they should be entitled to for remuneration on their work. If a facebook user comes to Steemit and has to overcome the initial barrier of spending hours to produce content which may not get rewarded or seen, then they would rather spend less time and take the personal victory of posting something that takes no time to produce on their facebook and have it applauded and liked by people they know.

To make the whole process better, there needs to be a gradual maturing of the platform which does not ostracise people for behaving in exactly the way they would on facebook (as well as the platform providing the UI to do so). But then, the site would just be a facebook wannabe.

Typical Facebook users, and typical Steemit users are not birds of a feather, and thus, aren't likely to flock together.