I try to read new articles, post replies to articles, and reply to the people who reply to my articles. It helps to get good conversations going. I think the problem is that people on steemit don’t read a lot of other peoples content, they just post with fingers crossed that people will upvote it.
Also it is not easy to find reply’s to your content. For example, if I reply to someone, then I have to really work to keep up with that reply, if others reply to me. There is not a way for responses to be flagged, sent to you somehow, or like on Facebook on the top it’ll have all your likes, reply’s etc flagged.

In short, if everyone was actively engaged both with content creation AND reading and replying to content, with an easy way to flag conversations you are having, it would do wonders for steemit. Two of those can be fixed by us users. The last is a fix by the network.