You are lucky. The first took me far more than five attempts.

In truth, the Steemit website has started getting slow page loading times for at least a few weeks. I am starting to wonder whether there really was a DDOS attack of whether it is a server/blockchain issue. Perhaps they don't have what is needed to run this site properly, but obviously cannot come out and say that.

I am probably wrong. But, the error messages that are often returned seem to speak to a blockchain overload of some kind.