I've noticed that as the price of STEEM and SBD go down people are less incentivized to create content and the number of active users posting goes down. New people definitely have a hard time sticking around for a few reasons but mostly because of the terrible user interface.

Who knows, maybe one day things will shape up, in the mean time just take Steemit for what it is- a permanent journal you can upload to the internet forever and never have to pay for upkeep.