I'm angry, disapointed and sad in the same time. Steemit has become a paid success platform and most of the talent lives in the shadows. I was or maybe am one of the best artists on steemit without braging but I don't know how much longer I will waste my time here.
Let me tell you my journey and how my payouts dropped from 20$ to 0,20$ due to voting bots.
I have been a member sinse august of 2016 but I didn't post much in the beginning. I didn't know what I wanted to post about and I didn't want to put out any crap. It wasn't until april of 2017 that I started posting for real.
I have always been a very good artist and the name I choose 
The problem started when the platform got filled with voting Bots. For those who don't know, a voting Bot is a user you can pay to get a big vote and possibly get to the hot and trending page to get more attention. I will be honest and say that I have used bots maybe a handful times but I didn't like it. It wasn't honest and I believed that my talent would get recognized anyway. But I was so wrong!!!
The Bots has increased and now it feels like 30% of the users are bots. 99% of the posts on hot and trending page is rubbish in my opinion and ALL of them is paid for by bots.
Another problem that I find is that people vote to get the curation reward, not if it's a good post or not. For example if a post have 70$ after 5 minutes people tend to vote on that post just because they know they will get more reward than a post that get 0,20$. They don't even read the post, instead they scroll down the hot and trending page just to vote on the ones they think will get highest payout.
When the Bots started to get used alot my payouts dropped from 20$ in average to 0,20$. This is because the reward pool gets sucked up by paid votes and everyone else have to share the leftovers.
My motivation is down and I don't know how much longer I will post here on steemit. I told myself that I will at least post until I get a 1000 followers, but after that I don't know. I don't believe in this platform anymore and if nothing happens if will fail to 100%. The real creative people will disappear and I will be one of them.