A big thing I've noticed is the small payouts when you're first starting out seems to discourage people. They want the reward immediately and because they don't make it to the trending page (or anywhere even close) they give up and go back to Facebook because the $1 post they spent 2 hours making isn't worth their time.

The problem with that is they need to think about it more long-term like the SBD example. I try and use BTC as an example, and it usually goes like this:

Steemit is only 1 year old (ish) and is trading for about $2. Bitcoin was worth about $3 when it was about 3 years old and is now $20k after 10 years. If you can get as much steem as you can right now, $1 at a time, using nothing but a little bit of time, how much could that be worth in 10 years?

Steem might not get up as high as bitcoin - or maybe it will - but if you can get 3 thousand steem while it's still cheap a little bit at a time and hold it, you can be a millionaire if it makes it to even $330. And the more you get, the less steem has to increase in value before you can retire.