I vote on posts I like. Period. I don't care who else has voted for them or what it means to my voting power. Trying to attract whales and post at just the right time and all that other stuff makes it way too complicated for what my life can handle right now. The issues with visibility are the same as you would have if you were an Internet marketer in the real world--getting people to notice my content is always going to be a challenge. On Steemit, that challenge is somewhat exacerbated by the fact that not all eyeballs are equal--here we're really trying to get eyeballs with high amounts of Steem Power to notice our content.

It seems to me that whales could maybe put out greater effort to notice and upvote content from new people or quality content that is unnoticed, but it may be that they are doing that and simply for the most part haven't come across mine yet. I've also seen articles by whales where from their perspective there is simply so much new content that it's too much for them to try to keep up with it.

If I could make one major change to Steemit, it would be that new writers are vetted in some way--their writing is checked for basics like originality, decent grammar and command of English language, and overall quality. Once they pass, they are allowed publishing priviledges. When they publish, their posts would earn a certain base amount--not huge, but a little something, some fraction of the overall Steem being created in a given time period in which they posted divided by all the posts. Then the rest of their pay would be commission and based on upvotes and who upvotes, like it is now. The downside to this is that you have to go heavier on the human action and so you'd also have to pay people to process new writer applications. And once a writer got accepted, someone would have to periodically check up on them to make sure they weren't abusing the base rate earnings priviledge. I have for the past few years written for the Devtome, which essentially guaranteed payment for your content, and I can assure you it took a large army of admins to curtail abuse. I like that Steemit doesn't require so much human involvement on the curating end. But it does mean that essentially, the payment system is 100% commission based, meaning it's not enough to simply write great content. It also has to be seen and liked by the right sets of eyeballs.

People who are looking to improve Steemit's writer compensation system should take a look at how the Devcoin Devtome project was handled. You can check it out by visiting this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.0 The Devtome had various issues and was not a perfect system, but I think it has some lessons that could be helpful here. Mainly it's been a journey of discovery as to how you can fairly compensate writers and other open source creators for their efforts, automate it as much as possible, and stay on top of fraud. Not an easy task. Steemit has a different approach.

I've noticed writing on the Internet is either completely compensated by some kind of commission, or it's paid for up front and someone else benefits from the marketing. I think a truly breakthrough system would be one in which content creators can earn both a base pay AND a commission. In this way, everyone is compensated, but those whose writing is especially popular benefit even more.

I see I've written you a novel LOL. Maybe I should write this up as a post.