You're not alone @jaynie,
I absolutely can confirm your feelings about Steemit.
Since December, member since last August, I started blogging here, mostly travel posts with my original pictures.
I realized more and more there is no way to get the right audience.
I started reading posts of the whales, especially the comment section is very interesting, and I realized, most of them see Steemit NOT as a social network, they see it as a Business and money making system.
There are so many things what have to be fixed to make Steemit social.
It starts with the unfair upvote and downvote system, you never can start argue with a bigger fish and not think to be careful that he flag your account to 0.
Some whale and dolphin groups upvote only their content and give a shit about new users.
Now I started already to make my posts shorter and using bots for "promote" them.
I wait for ONO and will take a look there, I think many, many other users will join ONO,too and if Steemit is not really careful, they will lose a lot.
So let's see how its going on..
Best frustated regards, hehehe
Tom