I believe this is baked into the equations that comprise the essence of STEEM. In order for Steemit to have the kind of democratic representation of ideas that it idealizes, all users would have to have equal voting power. Because power is centralized, the only way for content to compete with the favorites of the powerful is to buy influence from powerful entities.

It is interesting to note that "trending" and "hot" seem to weight things more toward how much money they've taken in rather than how many views and upvotes they have received. Don't you find that interesting? It creates an incentive for people to pay real money to purchase the currency to promote their own posts, and it's about competing for the attention of the heaviest voters, as opposed to the most voters.

So, this is not a place for people to get paid for their content. However, this is an awesome place to promote your own content with your own money. If you have something that you want people to hear, this is your forum. It's really cheap. Really fucking cheap. If you put in enough money, it's basically free, and you can cash that money out later, perhaps at a huge profit if you time it right, so it's an awesome fucking place for wealthy people. I wish I had the kind of money to put myself on top of trends.

Not only can the rich promote their own ideas, but they can make other peoples' ideas look popular, so they get tremendous control over what is visible in the search algorithms.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's great that we have a public space where it's relatively cheap for people to promote an idea in any subforum they want. It's not great for content creators to make a living, in normal circumstances, but it's a great place for them to advertise something they have to share.

If you're here for the money, then you'd probably better already have a lot of it. But, just wait until STEEM gets real popular and big corporations start buying up the coin for their accounts and then start donating rewards for people to like and share their brands...