I guess you can say the game is "rigged", although others would argue that they are simply playing by the rules of the game as implemented by the code.

The major issue is that Steemit's interface is very limiting and makes it very hard to discover interesting content. In order to build a feed that has interesting people, you have to find those interesting people first.

Unfortunately, "entrepreneurs" if you can call them that and whales have build bidding bots that serve to promote posts on the blockchain. That means most of the stuff you see on trending and hot is stuff that has been promoted. Unfortunately, you can promote content with completely disregard to the content itself. Thus, whoever is really to spend the most cash on bots, gets more attention. Also, this means these entities no longer organically vote, but sell their vote. They essentially contribute nothing to the blockchain, but still make money from it.

Due to the poor UI/UX design, there are really any spots to find organically voted material by regular users. There are a few developers working on systems to improve this issue, but let's just say that these updates have been repeatedly delayed.

To put Steem in a nutshell: It's a interesting social experiment but a rather poor social media experience.