Hi;) thank you for your post. Facebook and as you named them: the dogs;) have their bad sides, BUT in their case- they make the rules and that's it. In the world of steemit there is a huge part of manipulation as well, but created by smart users and all of their freaking bots. I used to recommend Steemit with my full heart. I stopped because it is not enough to have good content. Many people even don't look at the content. The trending pages are often full with posts, which get attention for many other reasons. That is the way it is. I understand the game, but the steemit ecosystem has some issues to fix and often very unfair way of paying out for the quality, which is offered. When really low quality content gets really high, it confuses all the new users, they start beaing sneaky with silly compliments to get attention, and consider they can make it work with same quality content too. That is my personal reason to stop promoting steemit till I see positive changes in that order. Most of the users I see as high quality content had their curve with $ going very down, all the sneaky users had the reversed thing- they doubled their curve. That is not ok. Let's be honest about it, if you are lucky that some powerful users vote for you, you win. If they don't it is just another plattform to share content and yes your content is not sold to others. I was super happy at the beginning with the whole idea of Steemit, but I am questioning it very much at the moment.