As you can easily see on the platform, it is not always great content that reaches the top leading to high payouts. It is also not always content with the most upvotes that reaches the top. Instead it is always content that has been voted on by the same handful of people.
Always.
ned, dantheman, smooth, berniesanders, rainman, itsascam, , steemed, etc. Check the steemit richlist for the most updates list of whales. https://steemd.com/richlist
They also usually vote on the same posts. Is this really how great content is curated? No, because a handful of people cannot cover every sector of interest, most interesting posts will be left out. Also they may present an interest for certain posts that is not shared by the majority. This could explain why some topics are more popular on Steemit when compared to other sites with better curation (i.e Reddit) It really is a flawed system and people are only there because they hope that a few of these 'whales' will vote on their posts. Additionally, these people can simply generate substantial funds by simply upvoting their own posts or comments which is really counterproductive for the community as a whole. What makes it even worse is that noone will be able to reach the amount of steem power these accounts have, because there simply isn't this much available on the markets. I really like the idea and the general concept, but they have completely messed up the allocation and the incentive structure. What can we do to fix this?