According to my personal experience, yes there are a lot of steemit groups, I am currently in two of them BUT within these groups are groups. If you can follow me, there are groups within these groups and if you are not "one of them", joining the group does nothing to your reputation or upvotes. One main reason why I am not active in steemit is about these groups. Yes, you post your links in there and supposedly help each other by upvoting each other's posts. But since I do not have a lot of SP, I upvote others but none upvotes me. It is not the money that discourages you but seeing there is no support. The "groups" for me are like a facade to say "hey we are helpful" but not all are helped. These did not happen to me once or twice but all the time. I had a talk with one steemian in the same group way long ago and he stopped posting in that group for the same reason. One even left the group since it is pointless and went solo instead since he gets the same support which is nothing.

I believe steemit is a good investment. I am mostly here for @originalworks contest. It doesn't give much but at least you still have some. I am not active with @surpassinggoogle Ulogs since it requires pictures for every post and I don't like posting personal pics. Other than that, there's no support. That is why I think there are a lot who left Steemit. I will be trying another social platform and hope it does better.