The importance of Whale's influencial behaviour.

In this post I want to talk about an interesting topic common to many people.
Steemit is a rapidly expanding social network, just think there's a waiting list to respect in order for your account to be approved (that's actually awesome!)
This means that every day, many new users - in jargon talking, the "minnows"- join this beautiful community contributing to its growth and providing interesting articles daily. Yes, some people come into contact with the platform only because some friends have provided him with little information, including "on steemit you can earn a lot of money by writing articles". Let's say that many users are here just for this, the profit.
It is also true that many other people are here instead to share their passion with other enthusiasts.

But this is a minor discussion. In either case, an article published by a new user may be very well written and interesting.
Yet many factors come into play here: a new user, as such, does not have many followers. A new user approaching a new social network does not know many people and the few are new users as well. These factors determine whether you want it or not, the potential and effective reach of the post: almost null.

As far as the article is well written and how much commitment has been made to build it, the number of people that will see the post is something that does not depend on the new user.

What do I want to say with all this you might think? Yeah, I may have fallen to deep without explaining my point, but here it comes!

The importance of Whale's influence

I've written about 30 articles more or less so far and most of them do not even get to a dollar. Nevertheless, I don't really care since writing articles on topics I like, is my passion. I don't live off of this, even though I would love to!
Some of these articles exceed 10 upvotes and some of them even reach 30. "Wow, get the fuck out of here, those are crappy numbers" you might think yet I don't care, I value a lot every single click on that upvote button! Anyway, those articles also struggle to reach a dollar. Why? Because the ratings given to these posts are of other minnows like myself and being such their voting power is rather limited (even after the recent restructuring of the voting system made during hardfork19). 

So I keep asking myself why aren't experienced and more influent users reading and upvoting my articles?
To they interact within their "private club"? I hope not, that would be childish. One reason is actually that they don't even get to read the article since its reach potential is very low. That's why they should influence one of them articles when they encounter it. Not saying every article. Only if its a valuable one of course!

Who knows. But guess what? The only articles that surpass the dollar in revenue are the ones in which there is a whale swarm.
Unfortunately, it is always the same person who seems to have found my articles on "marketing psychology" interesting, yet you have no idea how happy I am.
Let me introduce him: @fyrstikken is who I'm talking about.

Lately our social relationship is being strengthened as he himself deals with topics I find very interesting and that lead me to comment on his posts.

He is a whale to be taken as an example: His posts are not only interesting and well-written but are also engaging. Users are also encouraged to comment since he rewards constructive comments. And his vote on a comment is not a minor thing: I've been rewarded with $20 dollars on 2 comments I left on his posts today and I wasn't even expecting an upvote. Great strategy by the way my friend!  🚀  🚀 

Conclusion

Minnows are just new users and the struggle is actually real. A post may go viral only with the help of much more influential users, so called whales.

Whales should regulate the platform buy upvoting great content and so they do, yet many good articles don't grab their attention for some reasons one of them being very small scouting action.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining! My intention here is to give credit to @fyrstikken, such an awesome guy. 

To other minnows: don't get discouraged if you put a lot of effort in writing a valuable post and this only gets 5 views.
Keep on working hard, establish strong relationships with more experienced users from whom advices you can benefit and most importantly, don't evaluate your content based on how much you profit from it. That's secondary!

Till next post, love ya all.

~Steven