Yes sir, you are correct. It took me a while to understand exactly what steemit was about and what value it held, in competition with established and cleaner social network platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The core things that I have learned is, as a beginner, stay as active as you can, try to make 40 upvotes a day, upvote and resteem the posts that you enjoy and also that you see other people upvoting so you can gain a lot of steem power. Convert all of your posts to 100% steempower until you've been on for a while. Work to create really good and interesting content so that you may obtain votes and followers. Stay on top of steemd.com/username so you can see how much voting power you have left. When you run out of voting power, let it regenerate, and then vote some more, so you can keep building steem.
Hope some of this advice helps.
Thanks for the heads up.