It's great that you're taking the time to support other new joiners!! If you can believe it, it's actually 5000% easier now to join steemit and learn the ropes because there are so many resources now and posts to help newbies, but I understand that it can be hard to even discover them at first.
It's true that there are so many new accounts and so much crap for sure....kind of discouraging, but there are also so many incredible content producers that I can't keep up daily or weekly with everything I want to read. This is a good thing even if curating eats up so much time.
So, to answer your question - I found my favorite bloggers mostly by exploring and reading posts that caught my attention. Commenting and following these people regularly helps to develop authentic relationships if you genuinely connect with their posts. And often those posts have comments by others who blog about the same subject or of equal quality. You can tell a lot by the quality of someone's comment. It was very organic in the beginning for me and I spent a lot of time sort of discovering. I often see who my favorites are following as well since those people may be a good match.
And lastly, making friends through joining chats and groups can be really useful. I've met some good friends here that way.
I hope this helps!!
Thanks for the tips.
Unfortunately I don’t like chats - they drive me crazy, but I’m beginning to understand how the ball starts rolling. I set up my first contest earlier this week, and suddenly I’m picked up by a group of people who are doing the same thing, all using the same tag. And so we started supporting each other, getting to know each other better.
I started out here as a marketer, with the idea that 75% of the people I followed, would follow me back. That is about right, but it made me end up with a ... let’s call it a ‘diverse’ feed. I really got to clean that up tomorrow, because it’s hard to find the quality post in there...
ah yes I relate...got to clean up the feed sometimes! make sure those you follow continue to post worthwhile content for sure!