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.
Thanks guys for the responses, I feel better that I'm not the only one. Really like this site, would be great if it would work.
It just needs re-balancing, if the votes I just gave you were worth even 5 cents rather than 1 cent it would be a lot better and people would use Steemit normally rather than hoping to get noticed.
The whale vote can't shrink too much, but it should be weighted somehow, so there's diminishing returns after a certain amount of SP.