@sandrina.life brings up some excellent points here. The bar to entry is a bit high, but in addition to what she said previously, I think a lot of that has to do with the rather limited options for finding content you might be interested in, differentiating between popular posts vs high quality content, and understanding the mechanics of whales vs the rest of us.
Even the search function is exceedingly limited. On a site where we only have 7 days to vote for a post and compensate the author, it's imperative I can see the most recent options of what I'm looking for.
So while I love me some Steemit, it's tough to get people outside the realm of "crypto" and "hot new shit" to adopt anything more difficult than what they're already using even if it might pay them for their diligence.
You should download the steemit extension https://steemit.com/steemdev/@armandocat/steemit-more-info-1-4-chrome-extension-firefox-extension
With this extension there is one more research bar that allows you to search inside steemit and it is usually the most recent and upvoted post, according to the tag word that you insert