To me one of the biggest problems with steemit is what you like to call the circle jerk. There still remains no other way than knowing people to get people to notice your posts, other than having a high amount of up votes, which won't really get your post noticed, but rather call in people who are after easy money.
It also appears steemit noticed that people aren't getting views but still getting up votes so they decided to fix it: removed the view counter. The most stereotypical engineering move ever. It is such a stupid way of fixing the problem that it is almost funny.
I've always regarded steem as a blogging platform despite the ever increasing amount of bs status updates pouring in. However, with steemit they either have no idea how to or are not willing to fix the issue of "findability" of content. Content just seems to disappear into the void and no one ever saw it or heard of it unless people expected to see it appear.
I've been blogging for 1½ years on blogger also and even though I do it in Finnish, I still have thousands of views each month of which about 40% are returning visitors. Therefore, about 60% are always new visitors and I don't need to try to find them. And the worst part is, I've actually wrote more posts on steemit than on blogger...
The counter was broken and needed to be fixed (counted every refresh including from poster) but was better than nothing.
This will change with new front-ends. it isn't actually Steemit's job, there's is to make sure the chain can perform imo.
btw, how come you don't come into steem.chat?
I don't really care for yet another place to keep up with and when I was there in the beginning it was only a place to try to get ones posts up voted. Not sure how it is nowadays.
A place to talk and have a little bit of fun. If interested, hit me up under the same name.