I often hear people complain about whales ignoring them them but the reason they are not earning much is not because of whales not upvoting them but because steem user base is still tiny. If steem had the same amount of users as youtube people wouldn't care about whales because they wouldn't be so reliant on them to earn anything.
Currently a post that earned $10 was most likely upvoted by 1 whale but in the future its going to be 1000 likes worth 1 cent each that going to bring a post up to $10.
We need more people on here, that's it.