Okay, I see what you mean. I spend a bit of time each day looking for quality content by new authors, but have noticed it's not easy to find stuff worthy of voting & commenting on. After a few minutes of that I usually seek refuge in the tried & true favorites that populate my feed. I know I can always find good stuff among the established authors I follow.

I've also noticed it's very tough to get new followers now. A couple months ago I could pick up a couple new followers every day just by commenting on stuff as I usually do, but now it's a struggle to get a couple new ones per week. This may be because I need to expand and start looking at more posts outside my core domain, but when I try to do so I run into that difficulty in finding quality posts again.

Well, onward and upward as they say. I'm not particularly discouraged by these trends, it's important to keep a positive mindset and realize that it's still early days for Steemit. I'm quite excited by the proposed changes in how Steem works; will be very interesting to see what effect that has!