Your post reads like my inner voice in my early steemit posts. The first things I saw here where the begging and the I follow you - you follow me behavior. I didn't know anybody and I didn't know where to start. I very slowly started to find interesting people and I decided not to be shy and started to leave comments on interesting posts. But I didn't like the feed because of the rubbish I had to scroll through. I started to have fun the moment I looked up people who left interesting comments. There I found people who are genuine and caring and who made interesting blogs. When I found somebody I liked I leave a comment, something longer then 'nice post, here is my upvote'. If they don't react I move on. I don't want to be a groupie or a follower, i want to have connections. If I get a reaction thats friendly and longer than 'thnx' I come back another day to see if it is still an interesting person. If I make a connection with somebody I will look them up at least weakly but mostly it is more because they also look me up and thus we speak almost daily.

Please don't think the people here are only very technical or only young. The ages here are very different and frankly don't matter most of the time. I made friends here with people 20 years older (at least) en 10 years younger (at least) most of my connection I don't even know the age.