I am trying to heed your advice, but it is very difficult.
It is disheartening to watch as my follower base steadily grows and my payouts of $0.16 with 10 upvotes look nothing like the payouts of "whales" at $23 with 3 upvotes.
HF19 was branded "equality" but it still takes 250 "minnows" votes (which many have been trained to conserve to 10 a day) to equal ONE SINGLE 2% "whale" vote (which is often only given to people the whale has been following for months, or worse is "auto upvoted" based on bloggers that traditionally get high curation rewards).
Auto-curating is killing Steemit and really killing minnows. The votes cast based on "best ROI" mean that @jerrybanfield could literally post the alphabet one letter at a time and make $26,000 while minnows who spend time to go out and make something unique might make $1 if they have 1000 "quality" followers.
I'm not sure what can be done to fix it ... but Steemit seems to be steadily progressing toward a land of 20 whales and 25,000,000,000 voter bots.
I feel the same - only frustration after 3 weeks here, 500 followers for 3 weeks and literally 16 hours every day working here
I'm feeling a lot like you do, right now. I'm going to push forward, but I'm not seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
Do you think there is any way bots can be eliminated from the platform? They don't seem particularly helpful to building community.
The only way I can think of is to require a captcha for upvotes. This won't kill all the bots but it will require them to have a higher level of sophistication.
The other thing we should discourage is "pay for vote". As much value as there is in @randowhale for helping out the minnows, it is far too easily abused. With enough SBD or Steem, you could pay for upvote all your posts and then use the momentum to attract vote bots further degrading the overall quality of Steemit.
Here's an interesting discussion on that very topic: https://steemit.com/steemit/@walkingkeys/hey-steemit-is-using-randowhale-cheating-or-smart
I would definitely like to see this platform return to (as I understand it was initially) being a more organic community -- just people connecting and posting interesting stuff, rather than trying to find hacks and loopholes to make as much money as possible doing as little work as possible.
It can be frustrating! But the problems are not going unnoticed. The HF proved that. It was meant as an improvement. I know that technically we now need improvements to the improvement, but that's what is great about this platform -- it's a work in progress!
It is a fantastic advantage of this platform. As an opensource community owned project it has the opportunity to grow and change with the community. I, for one, will continue blogging what I love (because I love it)!
Hopefully I will also be noticed by a "big fish" or two :)