Great post @onetree!

Let me comment on your points one by one.

1- Trending page: It's a bit daunting to see some of these mega posts with their humongous payouts and you just know you can't be there anytime soon. Why? Because you're damn new!

2- Followers: I know what you're talkin about.. my followers have been growing daily and I don't get that much attention when I make a post.. it's kinda stupid that I'm starting to think they're mostly bots.. but it's always good to see the numbers growing.. kinda gives you the feeling that you're getting better.. more popular?

3- Family and Friends: I've talked about steem to a couple of friends.. but will they ever sign up? Who knows.. maybe one day when Steemit really takes off they will all join in a snap!

4- Self voting: Well... that's a tough one.. but I believe anyone is free to do whatever the hell they wanna do with their votes.. It's theirs after all. With only one exception: Creating spam posts in bulk just to upvote them.. this just gives a bad image to Steemit and I would classify it as blockchain abuse!!

5- Value our new members: Yeah I know it's kinda sad when you see someone begging for an upvote but in reality I know how hard it could be for anyone new to get some post views.. because I only started using Steemit just recently so I'm kinda in that same situation... But I just hope there will be more ways for new users to get noticed in the future.. let's see if the Communities inclusion will help with that.

6- We have a "new" section: Funny I've always considered the new section to be the same as home for some reason. So Weird. I should start looking at it now, thanks for the heads up!

7- Comments: I certainly try to upvote every single comment on my posts too but sometimes my voting power is so drained and I need to give it some time to cool off.. not that I'd be giving much anyways but I know it's always nice to appreciate people's comments on my posts.. I'm going to be powering up pretty soon in order to get my own slider.. yay!