As one of my earliest supporters @simplymike, I will always be grateful for those early boosts! But I also agree with your point here... and I'd like to add a little nuance:

It's great to help newbies and have newbie contests and initiatives... but I think what we need to consider is what constitutes helping newcomners by empowering them, and where we get into getting in our own way by actually getting in the business of offering "relative" newcomers a free ride.

My own approach has — from day one — been to take and ask for whatever help I could get with the aim of getting past the infamous "dust threshold" with my votes (currently 250-ish SP)... and then pretty much socialize my way to anything more more than that. I'm blessed to have that process speeded up a little with a couple of delegations at the moment.

Part of my point here is also that I never got a memo that said "Steemit's easy!" It's not. Social media success is not easy. It all takes work and perseverance... even when things suck.

But getting back to helping newcomers and redfish... maybe the key is to help just enough to EMPOWER people to be able to figure stuff out on their own... just like school, we don't need (hopefully!) teach to still hold our hand when we're 23...

=^..^=