Quality content is often unrewarded here, there's a few people that have all the voting power and lots of "minnows" trying to get noticed, if they don't see your blog post it dies. It seems a lot of it's down to the early adopters being far more powerful than the average user. Hey, they deserve a lot for their effort, but all the voting weight in a few hands will make it very difficult for new users. Steemit is fundamentally flawed, I fear it may die. I've become disheartened like you and will probably not stick around long, thought about powering down today and I've been having more success than the average noob.

I've been getting the same error as you, as well as having to re-follow people I was already following.

Sometimes all I want is to start a conversation on a subject, but if your post doesn't immediately get a $5 upvote, no-one's interested, no matter how well-written. Everyone's chasing pennies and there's not a lot of real conversations happening.