@kevinwong, I'm so glad to see posts like this one as well as all of the thoughtful commentary here. Sadly, this seems to be rare on Steemit. My impression as a person who is new to the platform is that Steemit is fundamentally flawed when it comes to meeting its stated goals of rewarding and encouraging high quality content. When you look at the "marketing" of Steemit and the FAQ, everything seems so simple: provide high quality content in the form of posts or comments, or upvote quality content and you will be rewarded. But do a bit of research and reading, and browse the site, and its pretty obvious that things are (1) much more complex than that; and (2) not working all that well. The issues that strike me as new to the platform are the 7 day limit on payout, the pay for upvote bots, the ability to upvote your own posts, the massive power of a few steemers, and the shockingly low quality of even posts that garner high rewards posted by users with lots of power. I've said in other comments that other sites are actually working to get high quality content. StackExchange is one such site with consistently high quality content. The other big problem is that there seems to be no real moves to address these issues by those who can actually address them. It is shocking to me that these issues were not already addressed. I could wrong about all this, but even if I am, how do you think Steemit will be build a strong user base if this is the kind of impression that new users get?