It is a problem indeed that many actors here only pay attention to their "feed" - and this "user authority"-idea is not really helping! I can imagine new users being frustrated, I've seen many high-quality posts being totally ignored. Posting good content is not sufficient in itself as long as one doesn't have followers.
What to do? Engage! Write comments on articles written by others. Give generous upvotes. Check out the various curation initiatives like steemSTEM etc.
Right! Engaging in other people's articles is a critical step for networking and something I forgot to add as part of the promotion explanation in this article. Thank you for mentioning this - great addition. I may have to update the article with this info as well.