Yesterday i have tried buying somve votes for an expetiment since everybody started talking about it. I am steemit user for about 4 months. I have made over 7000 posts, have over 1100 followers. I would not argue over the quality of my posts. It's subjective.

I've put a lot of work and time into platform. Creating only orginal comtent. I did reviews, i did tutorials, i did extensive posts, and sometimes i would just upload an image. There is no correlation at all. If not for a few people that have me on the upvote list i would be making cents a post. Now i am earning ~1.5 - ~2.5
It is still way more than so many users who post quality content.

We also built our photography community over Steemi blockchain and also are bringing dozens of new users to steemit platform who are creating exceptionaly quality content. I've trying to reach out to some whales but with no avail.

I am not complaining here just stating the obvious, as my interest does not lie in earning from posts myself rather than building solutions that could work on a massive scale.

If the buying votes is gone we are going to see that hundred people in trending again, making them the ones who are actually earning again. I appreciate all the time they have put while helping to grow the platform and all and i have absolutely nothing agains them.

Just stating the obvious. Steemit as a platform has very serious issues in it's core and is going to die unless something very serious is not done very fast.

Or the same circle of people will continue to earn while the others will continue to make cents a day. While it is a viable option for some from very poor countries, which is absolutely awesome and i am happy that they are able to make 10USD a week which is a month salary there, but at this rate steemit will never ever see a mass adoption and will continue to shrink which will lead to a drastic drop in steem price which will still be fuelled by FOMO.

The only thing that can save Steem blockchain itself are SMT's, but we will have to see how that develops. Might be another number of ICO's funded by the same sircle of 100. Might be that it will turn out big.

As for steemit as front end application i am very sceptic. System in theory would have worked very well, but is killed by extremely uneven token distribution. And everybody knows this.

Final note: If whales do not wan't to see their 500k steem and more turn into 5000k dollars in the next 12 months they should consider getting back to manual curation heavily.

It would really be a shame to see such a promising concept fail.