In my test regarding the randomness of earnings I came to the conclusion that it is in fact completely random in most cases. Did you know that when you edit your post, add a space or just change the used tags, you get an extra up vote in most cases? This process can be done again and again, walking through all the tags here on Steemit... :) Sometimes it don't work in the evening, but some hours earlier or later. I think what most people don't know is how many bots are voting their articles. And what I saw, while analysing who on Steemit makes use of whale shares, is that nearly all the well paid publishers do it. I didn't want to do it, but if there is no other way and so many people are doing it, I'll give it a try in the next days. I'll come back to you and post my results here ;)