I think part of the problem is that the current setup makes it hard to establish communities within Steemit. Sure, you can frequent certain tags and see some familiar people posting, but its hard to create a sense of community without some method of creating formal communities to bond it all together.

Hopefully a future release will enable tags to be secondary to communities, where people can gather and build passionate sections of Steemit that encourage better comments, more discussions, more teamwork and even starting some new friendships.