"attractive girl posts a photo, gains hundreds of followers, gets massive amounts of love and attention." I always wondered how did we allow Kim Kardashian? It's a shallow society of fakeness of superiority... based on inferiority complex. Look how much I have, look how happy I am.. So on. Likes counting.
It's the era of resembling everything that's happening around us too - overproduction, over-waste, over-rush. People got used to it. Since we are little copy cats (human nature) we, ourselves started acting like that (vast majority at least, not all) and it became a norm. Tell a lie a hundred times and it becomes the truth. In the beginning we think its shallow, phony - as time passes we adopt it.
Steemit is a nice concept, but just as in real life has its own social politics that are not ideal :)