I'm new here so will be interested to hear what those with more experience think.

I've been a little disappointed to discover that most of the wealth appears to be held by a small number of whales who make mind boggling amounts from their own upvotes, not to mention from those who are in their loop.

I came to Steemit to move away from that but greed seems just as rife here a it is outside.

I'm finding that I seem to have developed a game playing attitude so I like to create content whilst seeing how much I can make from it at the same time. So paying attention to tags and posting times etc.

I haven't paid for votes and feel a bit like it's cheating but that's not to say that I wouldn't join in if I got despondent trying to do without. So far I've used posting, interaction and engagement to build my following.

I sincerely hope that Steemit doesn't go the way of all the other social media platforms albeit here, advertisers/owners would be replaced by the powerful whales who are only interested in money.

And I can't help wondering whether since this is pretty radical and the first attempt at it, it is doomed to fail until lessons have been learned and something better built, in the next iteration, that prevents the inequities developing in the first place.

And I don't really understand the economics of it so maybe the rich whales still serve a useful purpose and such a platform couldn't be built without them.