I really don't think Steemit is different than any other social media platform. Like others have said in the comments here Steemit is what you make it. Same goes for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. If you want to grow "your brand" you have to do a like for a like, you have to go and comment on 40 similar channels or "brands". Which in reality is a horrible growing strategy, I hated this on YouTube in particular. You would spend so much time and money in growing your channel, for someone to come a long and say "hey can you promote my channel?" Like that's why I started my channel, so I can promote yours? Another reason why it doesn't work is the time and effort it takes to follow someone. Say if you follow for follow 1,000 people, it would be so time consuming just to like all their content. Let alone to truely "engage" with them. Once this happens people will start to unfollow you.

In trying to grow a "brand" this was the worse kind of support. If you want to grow a brand on the net you have to produce things, thoughts, and or art, that people actually want to see/hear, that will make them want to support you. Why, because they want see/listen to what you are gonna do next.

A perfect example of this is I was watching a great TA instructor on YouTube. I would comment often, but 0 engagement from the instructor. That was fine, in the end I was there to learn TA not to gain a friend, him providing great TA lessons was enough for me to keep watching and even engage with likes and comments.

As far as the side of the coin, I think this could be a place to meet friends with the same interests. Like most social media platforms you're gonna need real friends first though. Sharing stories, lessons, opinions, whatever your "thing" is and if other want to join then great, if not at least you have your friends.

In the end we all think we are special and we're not. We see people share photos of their dinner, or express their thoughts, or even play with toys. Looks so easy, that's because when people are good at something they make it look easy. It's not, but we still for some reason we still think it is. People think they can post some crappy photo of their dinner and be famous or make $350 of Steem becasue someone else has. They fact is they person who made the post that made $350 from a food post is probably a professional photographer, married to chef. They probably spent all day setting up (light, props, background) plus actually making the food. People want the money, without the work. You can see/hear this everywhere in society. Not just social media.

So I view Steemit the same as I view the other ones, if people are engaging with you. It's to either get what you are offering(advice, opinions, art, teaching, heck even something funny to distract them from their real life. Or people want something, if it's just and upvote or a resteem. They still want something. The only difference in my opinion is that here we control more if the income on this site, I feel the other sites not only use the content creators, buy the users as well. If you want followers anywhere you have to put out good content and do it consistently!