I agree, I work hard on every post, I do one a day. You look at the trending, it's a couple of pasted charts and some text saying buy low sell high. It makes a thousand bucks. anyone could post that 20 times a day. Meanwhile minnows scrounge to get a couple bucks for a high quality creative post. My upvotes come from people like me or just a little bigger than myself. They work hard and post great content also, and I support them. What I wonder is why so much steem goes to info you can Google easily, and is outdated as soon as it's up. Is that really valuable for mining purposes? And what about all the creative original content created specifically for Steemit just sitting there making a buck or two or worse none at all? If I were a whale I would be looking for high quality content that is under exposed. Not charts that are garbage the next day. It's not hard, I find great content every day from minnows and plankton, I upvote it boom, they get a penny. You're just saying reinvest the profit where it belongs and it is healthier for the community, it's that simple. I get it, who wants to browse Steemit when you're sitting on your island sipping margaritas. It just seems to me it would be in the whales best interest to build a larger value base filled with superior content. Op is right, those creators are what will keep this platform viable. They need to see some reasonable growth, because if they are talented creators at some point they might as well go to a traditional medium to make money. Maybe rather than sell to the highest bidder a whale could find a few solid active minnows and delegate it to them so they can support solid content? Nothing sucks more than reading an amazing original story or watching a great video with .02 payout and then clicking trending and seeing a cut and paste job with 500.00. Or maybe that's just me. Great post by the way goblin.